Who knew—not I, did you?—
the beauty of a dandelion 
gone to seed, clothed in morning dew. 
—C. M.

I share the following contemplation, published yesterday on Winter Wheat, and invite readers who may be interested in receiving similar commentary, less strictly reportage, to consider subscribing to that Substack site as well. All of my work is freely available. I am, as always, grateful for any contributions readers may wish to offer.

—C. M.

■

12 MAY—Who knew? Who knew on 6 October of 2023 that 7 October would forever change the world?

Who knew Israel would use the Hamas attack—a long-overdue breakout from the world’s largest concentration camp—to implement a genocide?

Who knew Israel’s much vaunted “right to defend itself” extended to illegally occupied territory and justified the mass slaughter of civilians? And who knew so many Western leaders—and, it must be said, ordinary people—would accept and even insist upon this depraved and immoral premise?

Who knew most of the world, with the admirable exception of South Africa, would remain silent?

And worse.

Who knew the United States would, in the first two years after 7 October, give Israel nearly $28 billion in military aid and weaponry to sustain Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza?

Who knew the United Sates would willingly corrupt its Constitution, shred it’s Bill of Rights, overthrow academic freedom, and destroy any international legitimacy it may have had in behalf of Zionist Israel?

Who knew that countries—including all of the BRICs nations—would continue doing business with Israel—in energy, technology, and security? All areas that support a genocide. Who knew economic relationships and advantages outweighed international law and basic human decency?

Who knew that Yemen would be the only country to fulfill its legal obligations under Article 1 of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which obligates signatories to prevent genocide?

Who knew the depths of Jewish Israeli sadism?

Who knew the genocide would still be under way as of today, as of the day you’re reading this?

Who knew that on 28 February the U.S. and Israel would begin carpet-bombing Iran, targeting schools, hospitals, apartments buildings, civilian infrastructure and industry, journalists, and aid workers?

Who knew Israel would use the cover of a fictitious ceasefire to turn southern Lebanon into a pile of rubble like Gaza and one million Lebanese into refugees?

Who knew a vast majority of Israeli Jews would support ethnic-cleansing and genocide? And who could have guessed I.D.F. soldiers would film themselves celebrating their depravity?

Indeed, who knew the depravity of Zionists or the cruelty of Jewish Israelis or the barbarity and madness the U.S. empire, in its decline, would unleash upon the world?

Who knew that we—we, all of us—would each day teeter on the edge of nuclear war?

All of that and also this:

The beauty of a dandelion, gone to seed, clothed in morning dew.

Everything I write is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting my work. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. You can also share this report. Thank you.

30 APRIL—I’m dissatisfied, it’s time to state bluntly, with reporting events from the West Bank. It seems increasingly obvious that documenting and reporting Israel’s brutality is not enough. While reportage remains important for its contribution to historical documentation and as an expression of solidarity, it’s insufficient. The foundation of the problem and those who are responsible for it remain largely unaddressed and unacknowledged.

My Palestinian contacts are ever grateful to have their stories told and heard. And indeed, I will continue to share them. But reports in this vein keep Palestinians at a distance, cast as an objectified Other, always the victims of another’s violence while we—we Americans—are nowhere present. Except in our witnessing. But what is it we are witness to? Our own failures?

Accounts of Jewish Israeli depravity have taken on a perverse and dangerous quality of monotony. The stories have become predictable and almost formulaic. How many times can you read about destroyed olive groves, demolished homes, stolen land, the arrest and mass incarceration of men, women, and children, and settler pogroms and rampages in which Palestinians are killed and wounded? People quickly become numb to the violence in all of its manifestations, from mundane cruelties to unspeakable sadism. Numb and convinced there is little to nothing they can do.

And of course this presumption of powerlessness is among the intended consequences of Zionist impunity.

But something is missing when the focus remains on Israel. We—you and I, we in the West—are removed from the picture altogether such that we become invisible when, in fact, we are everywhere present in events as they unfold in Palestine and throughout West Asia. The grotesque slaughter and destruction carried out by the Israel-U.S. empire in the West Bank—and in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran—is a direct consequence and expression of the failure of American democracy at home—the collapse of the American republic and the democratic ideals upon which it was ostensibly founded.

And this is where ordinary Americans fit into the larger picture of what is happening in the West Bank, and of course elsewhere. The situation in Palestine has always been a call to Americans—a call to wake up and save, not Palestine, but first of all ourselves.

It is this larger context that I begin to address in a lecture I gave on 10 April in Sirnach, Switzerland. What follows is the talk in its entirety, with minor editing.

—C.M.

I’m going to talk about the West Bank where, since the assault on Iran began, every roadblock and checkpoint has been closed—nearly 900 of them at last count. Schools are closed and classes are online. Villages that lack grocery stores and medical clinics are now cut off from both. Palestinians are forced to use primitive dirt roads where there’s always the danger of ambush by settlers.

Settlers rampage daily through villages, beating and killing people with impunity and with support from the Israeli military. The Knesset just passed a law that “imposes the death penalty for the deliberate killing of a person with the intention of ‘negating the existence of the State of Israel.’” This according to Human Rights Watch.

How did it come to this? I want to address this question as we consider the West Bank. The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the genocide in Gaza, which continues to this day, are happening because democracy in my country, the United States, has failed. We need to make this connection: between events in the West Bank and Gaza and the collapse of our democratic ideals.

The admittance of Israel to the United Nations as a full member state in May 1949, and all that preceded and followed from that, the betrayals of Palestine, the barbarities committed against the Palestinian people, the current assaults on Iran, Lebanon, and also Syria by the U.S. and Israel—all of this is evidence of the catastrophic failure of western democracy and Western democracies, foremost the United States.

There has been no public debate in America about any of this. No American, no ordinary citizen, was ever consulted; our consent was neither sought nor ever given. Our consent is irrelevant. Congress was coopted by the Israel lobby decades ago. Zionist billionaires purchased the executive branch. Sexual blackmail ensures compliance with Israel’s diktats. There’s a straight line from the Zionist lobbies to the corruption of the American Congress to what I’m going to tell you about the West Bank.

The failure of democracy in the United States runs deep.

The authority to declare war resides solely with the U.S. Congress, but Trump didn’t consult Congress before bombing Iran. He didn’t bother to make a case for war with Iran to the American people. The executive and legislative branches of my government—the president and congress—are in violation of the constitution. The U.S. military, in obeying Trump’s orders, is in violation of the constitution. And this has been so for a very long time. America hasn’t actually declared a war since December 1941. The United States no longer acts, not at home and not abroad, according to law.

This failure of which I speak is everywhere apparent: in the corruption of our institutions of governance including the judiciary, the loss of civil liberties, not least in the corruption of the media, to name but a few examples.

In sum: The United States is in a constitutional crisis. My country is in a process of constitutional collapse that began well before Trump’s second presidency.

And this explains America’s behavior abroad including what is happening in Palestine.

While the failure of democracy is seen most clearly at the institutional level it happens within the individual as well. I’m talking about a pernicious psychological state that I see in my fellow citizens. I see it because I recognize it, if perhaps more faintly, within myself. And here I’m describing and condensing complex social and psychological processes.

Consider distraction. Instrumentalized distraction. Distraction as a tool of social control. Everything now in the United States is a form of entertainment: food, exercise, spirituality, news—you name it.

“My Husband Can’t Get a Job. Should I Divorce Him?” That was a headline on an opinion piece in the New York Tims on Monday, next to an article titled “A Harrowing Race Against Time to Find a Downed Airman in Iran.” This too is entertainment. And it’s all smoke and mirrors. Do you know this English term, smoke and mirrors? It refers to the tricks of a magician meant to obscure what he is actually doing.

The two articles I just mentioned are not value neutral. They’re subliminally pernicious. When you’re incessantly encouraged not notice or think critically about what your government is doing at home or elsewhere, you lose all inclination to do so. Distraction is a form of pacification.

Perhaps most damagingly, the distracted person becomes severed from his own intelligence, severed from his connection to others, severed from the inevitable solidarity that arises in connection with others. Distraction induces indifference. Not only do people become indifferent to the suffering in Gaza or Iran or West Virginia, for example, they become indifferent to never having been consulted about government policy and actions in the first place. Most Americans don’t even notice they haven’t been asked for their consent.

All of this encourages a willful self-sabotage. Distraction is easy. It feels good. People learn not to want the responsibilities of freedom, the responsibility that democracy demands of its citizens.

And of course distraction is compelling precisely because we all know—we Americans—that things are terribly wrong. A majority of Americans have come to believe that there’s nothing we can do to bring about effective change. This in turn leads to an acquired sense of helplessness, to hopelessness, and ultimately despair.

I’m calling this manufactured despair because it’s a direct consequence of the institutional failures of democracy. Feelings of helplessness, hopeless, and despair in turn result in a self-destructive passivity—another form of self-sabotage. But this self-sabotage is the consequence of the intentional sabotage of democracy by those in power. Despair is rampant in the United States. We have high rates of suicide and drug overdoses, which are referred to as “deaths of despair.”

And all of this—all of what I’ve just described—is directly connected to what’s happening in the West Bank.

■

When we met in August for Mut zur Ethik (an annual conference held in Sirnach, the name of which means “the courage to take a moral stand”), I gave a talk about the ethnic cleansing of Deir Alla. This was a bedouin community connected to the nearby village of Kisan through family relationships and shared land. When Deir Alla was destroyed Kisan became the next target of settler violence.

I will focus now on Kisan because it tells the story of what’s happening elsewhere in the rural areas of the West Bank.

Kisan is located roughly 11 kilometers south of Bethlehem.

All of the historic land belonging to the village, land used for farming and grazing, has been seized. People in Kisa have had to sell many of their sheep to order to buy fodder for their remaining animals and to support their families financially. This includes the families from Deir Alla who are still living in overcrowded conditions with family members in Kisan because they have nowhere else to go.

To give you an idea of the harassment Kisan residents face every single day I’ll show you a few photographs. These are from before 28 February when the U.S. and Israel launched their war of aggression against Iran. Everything is now much worse. All of my information comes in the form of WhatsApp texts from Adnan al–Abayyat, who lives in Kisan and has been documenting settler violence for many years.

These photos (above) are from 13 February. They were accompanied by the following text from Adnan:

This afternoon, settler attacks against the residents of Kisan village continued. Armed settlers chased villagers away, preventing them from grazing their livestock on lands adjacent to the village and bringing settler shepherds to the area.

These photos (above) arrived also on 13 February. They show evidence of chemicals sprayed near one of the homes at the edge of the village. The chemical was most likely the herbicide glyphosate, which is frequently mixed with a blue dye so it’s application is visible. I was told by a contact who monitors human rights abuses that chemicals are being sprayed elsewhere in the West Bank.

During this same period of time the Israeli army sprayed glyphosate on agricultural land in southern Lebanon and in Syria at levels 20 and 30 times the recommended concentration. This was documented by the U.N., and reported fairly extensively, including in Haaretz but not in the U.S.

The spraying of herbicides on agricultural land is a war crime.

Here (above) is a picture of settlers using an all-terrain vehicle to chase sheep in Kisan. These animals are already stressed from malnutrition because they can’t be grazed. This is from 20 February.

Kisan is one of many small villages that doesn’t have a grocery store or a medical clinic. Since the war on Iran began, it’s been entirely cut off from direct access to the nearest villages that have both. A drive that used to take 20 minutes now takes close to an hour on dangerous dirt roads that are subject to settler attack.

Kisan is under a state of siege. The entire perimeter of the village is subject to armed attack. Settlers roam the village at will as a form of harassment. They, the settlers, bring their sheep right up next to the village and graze their animals in olive groves allowing the sheep to damage the trees (see video below). Meanwhile, the army won’t let Kisan shepherds go beyond 40 meters outside of the village.

■

On 14 March settlers attacked village shepherds and shot two men: One was hit in the thigh, the other in a foot. In the same attack, a woman had several fingers broken and two other men were beaten. One of these men had his arm broken and that man, with the broken arm, was arrested. In the end, sixty sheep were stolen.

In the following video settlers are seen rounding up the sheep. As Palestinians attempt to stop them you hear two gun shots. The second video shows settlers driving the stolen sheep away in one large flock. A Palestinian woman can be seen running after them in the lower right quadrant of the video. The chaos and panic are apparent.

■

The army raided Kisan on 26 March and entered numerous homes including Adnan’s. The soldiers had a message on their phones in Arabic which they played to people. Here’s Adnan’s text from that day:

The Israeli army raided several homes in the village, including mine. They told us not to gather, confront, or shout during any settler attacks. Instead, we are supposed to lock ourselves inside our homes. They recorded a message in Arabic on a soldier’s phone, essentially telling us to submit to the settlers and accept a new reality: The settlers have free rein to do as they please.

Let me be clear: Palestinians aren’t safe locked inside their homes. Settlers routinely throw molotov cocktails into homes. This happened in the bedouin community of Deir Alla this past July. In 2015, settlers burned a family alive inside their home. The only survivor, a boy of four, was badly burned over 60% of his body.

■

Settlers are now building a new road that will pass along the east side of Kisan, next to numerous homes which will likely be demolished. When finished, it will complete a road belt that will encircle Kisan and its two closest villages. The road will connect all of the settlements and outposts in the area and isolate the villages in a small encircled enclave. Adnan describes this as a “new reality to create Palestinian cantons isolated from each other and besieged in a way that prevents any expansion of Palestinian villages.” In short, the villagers have nowhere to go. As the population increases in the villages they won’t be allowed to expand.

In the first map below you see the three villages (left, top to bottom) of Taqoa, al–Miniya, and Kisan (red Arabic script). The lines on the right show where the road is going, connecting the illegal settlement of Taqoa (at the top in yellow script—the settlement taking its name from the nearby Palestinian village) with two other settlements below Kisan (script also in yellow). The photo at the right shows the road swinging near homes located at the edge of Kisan—the homes vulnerable to demolition. These maps are a testament to Adnan’s unflagging documentation of settler violence and expansion as his village is threatened.

■

I texted Adnan’s wife to find out how the children of Kisan are doing. She sent pictures of children’s artwork along with her reply.

When the war on Iran began, the Palestinian Authority closed all of the schools and universities. All classes are being held on line. But Kisan, like other remote villages, doesn’t have internet. Only homes that have wireless internet SIM cards have access to the internet. And the signal is weak. Each home has 4 to 10 children in it and even with internet access families don’t have enough computers and other devices for them to use. These are poor families and most children are losing their education.

Because of the constant threat from settlers, and danger from Iranian missile fragments that have already killed people in the West Bank, the children spend most of their time indoors. They don’t meet with their friends. They rarely play outside. Children’s activities at the library have been reduced out of concern for their safety.

The drawing on the left (below) shows a map of all of historic Palestine—stabbed by a knife and bleeding. The Arabic reads: “They killed her in cold blood.” In the drawing on the right bombs are dropped on residential buildings.

Students met at the library in February during Ramadan and created a cutout mural depicting their school and all of the things they miss since its closure (left, bottom left). The photo at the top right depicts a torn and bleed Palestinian flag.

■

Had democracy in my country not failed by slow degrees over a long period of time, life in Palestine would be very different today. Of this I am certain. Had our media in America not lost its independence, had it reported on events and abuses of power with objectivity and honesty and attention to history, almost certainly my talk today would have been very different. At this point we might wonder if the corruption of media has not indeed been the greatest failure of American democracy. The failure that enabled all others.

But if one must occasionally despair, as is only human, let us take a lesson from Palestinians. And here I quote my friend Sadeel texting me about despair in Palestine:

Of course we feel despair. But the way we deal with it is different, and most of the time we don’t have time to express it. We barely have time to feel it. But we do feel despair. But we have to let our emotions be the fuel for change instead of sitting and whining over our occupied land.

Palestinians feel despair but it’s a fuel for their resistance and not, as too often in America, an excuse for indifference and passivity. There is a real lesson here for us.

I’ll end now with the words of another Palestinian friend, Raya, who talks about hope. Raya was one of my partners on the kindergarten playground in al–Mughayyir. I’m happy to report the playground was completed in early February (as reported here). The children enjoyed it for two weeks and then the school was closed when the war began.

Here is Raya, from a text she sent that was previously published here:

Palestinians believe that the colonial reality imposed on them cannot be accepted or endured, it must be confronted. The presence of hope does not mean adapting to this reality; it means rejecting it. Hope here is not an emotional feeling, but a conscious stance and an act of resistance.

To have hope is to refuse the normalization of this reality. And in order to confront it, hope must remain, because without hope there is no life and no steadfastness. Hope affirms our inner existence, prevents us from breaking, and gives us the strength to continue.

Hope grows from the act of rejecting this reality. Its absence, on the other hand, implies acceptance and that is a tragedy. All our steadfastness is built on hope, and all our continuation depends on it. That is why hope must remain alive, no matter how harsh the reality is.

At the same time, the daily hardships people live under—occupation, poverty, loss, repression, and closed horizons—understandably shape their emotional state. It is true that you may see people who appear exhausted, discouraged, or even hopeless on the surface. This does not mean that hope is absent; it means that hope exists under pressure.

As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, ‘We love life if we find a way to it.’ This love of life is not denial of pain, it is resistance to it. People may look tired, but they continue to live, to love, to raise their children, to plant their land, and to remain. And this, in itself, is hope.

Published simultaneously at Winter Wheat.

Everything I write is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting my work. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. You can also share this report. Thank you.

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11 MARCH—It is 11 days into the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and there are no reports in corporate media on the impact of this aggression in the West Bank even as missiles fly over the heads of Palestinians in West Bank towns, villages, and refugee camps. In a repeat of the war in June, the Zionist regime immediately closed all checkpoints, roadblocks, and gates—some 900 in all. The entire West Bank is locked down. The situation in Gaza is worse. These, let us never forget, are also fronts in Israel’s wider war across West Asia.

Across the West Bank, travel is possible only on primitive dirt roads where Palestinians are more easily ambushed and attacked by settlers. This is devastating for rural villages that have no medical facilities or grocery stores. A drive that would normally take 20 minutes to buy food now requires an hour each way. Schools are closed and students attend classes online. There are no ambulance services. Garbage is piling up in cities and villages throughout the West Bank posing health concerns.

Settler violence has surged. As always, the Zionist regime uses the cover of war to advance its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. As of 8 March, six Palestinians had been killed by settlers and soldiers. In Gaza, all deliveries have stopped. The starvation siege continues; Israel bombs the enclave daily from the coast, if not, per usual, the air.

A friend texted me from Nablus on 1 March, two days into the war: “We live now inside a prison. All the checkpoints are closed. No one can move outside Nablus.” On Thursday he sent the following report. We must never forget that Palestine is at the very center of Israel’s wars in West Asia as Palestinians, at this point as best they can, continue to defy and resist the Zionist vision of Greater Israel. Existence is resistance.

Of necessity I publish this report anonymously.

—C.M.

5 MARCH—The region is currently witnessing significant tensions due to the ongoing events between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other. These developments have clearly affected the situation in the West Bank, where many aspects of daily life have been impacted as a result of regional instability and rising tensions.

These events have led to increasing economic pressure on citizens. Prices have started to rise noticeably, even though the situation had already been difficult since the beginning of the war on Gaza. As tensions continue and the conflict expands, the economic situation has become even more challenging, affecting people’s purchasing power and the availability of some basic goods.

In addition, the atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety accompanying these events has increased the suffering of people in the West Bank, especially given the already difficult living conditions faced by many residents. As time passes and the conflict with Iran continues, fears are growing that the economic and social situation may worsen further, which negatively affects the lives and stability of the population.

Moreover, many Palestinian villages in the West Bank have been experiencing repeated attacks by settlers. These attacks often result in injuries to Palestinians and damage to property. Recently, these assaults have increased, further intensifying the sense of fear and tension among residents. The most recent attack resulted in the killing of two Palestinian men, highlighting the seriousness of the security and humanitarian situation faced by civilians in the area.

Overall, the ongoing military escalation in the region affects not only the parties directly involved in the conflict, but also impacts surrounding communities, including those in the West Bank, where residents are facing increasing economic, social, and security challenges as a result of these developments.

Published previously at The Floutist.

Everything I write is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting my work. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. You can also share this report. Thank you.

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First thought, best thought.
—Allen Ginsberg

7 MARCH—My first thought as Marwa, my guide and interpreter, drove us away from a tiny two-room kindergarten in the remote West Bank village of al–Mughayyir was one I blurted out loud: “I’m going to raise money to build a playground for those kids. Are you willing to help me?” She nodded. And she did.

That was in the final week of May 2024. Two months later and back in the U.S., I published an account of my unsettling encounter with the kindergartners—“‘Soldiers! Soldiers! Soldiers!’”—and launched a GoFundMe campaign, made successful by generous donations from many of our readers.

It is now my great delight to share with you the happy news that the playground is finally finished, as of the second week in February. To all who made this possible: Shukran. Thank you. I waited for photographs of the children at play before publishing this update.

As you might imagine, given the situation in Occupied Palestine, this project did not always go smoothly. There were significant delays, long months when nothing happened as checkpoints were closed and violence erupted. Including the first war against Iran. For nearly six months we waited for the play equipment to be delivered. The supplier, we learned, had imported it from China. It was sitting in an Israeli port and would not be released. The money was returned, all of it, and we found another vendor.

From start to finish this project was a lesson in something almost entirely missing in the United States: Trust. Trust in other people. Trust that, working together, something good can be realized even in the most difficult of circumstances.

I’m calling this radical trust.

Why radical? Consider some synonyms: far-reaching, thorough, profound. And: revolutionary. The Latin origin radix—“root” in the botanical sense—meant the foundation, source, or origin of something. Trust is assuredly the foundation of all meaningful human relationships and endeavors. Two other closely related words— and synonyms for revolutionary—include unorthodox and imaginative. Far-reaching indeed when you consider the impacts of this project: for the children a little happiness, for the parents the same knowing their children are happier—and knowing others outside of Palestine see them and care. For the community it’s an expression of solidarity.

Unorthodox and imaginative problem solving is a necessity in the West Bank, where finding ways to accomplish the impossible while flying beneath the radar are necessary skills. Everything depends upon trust. Personal safety and liberty are not infrequently at stake because anything that supports community, anyone who works to build and strengthen Palestinian community, can be targeted.

My project partners, who deserve recognition, must of necessity remain anonymous.

It’s difficult getting money into the West Bank. The money we raised was funneled through a contact in al–Khalil (aka, Hebron). This person managed the process and then held the funds for nearly 18 months as it was disbursed.

A woman from a tiny village near Ramallah made four trips to al–Khalil to pick up each of the four disbursements—in cash—and carry them north. Every trip in the West Bank entails difficulties and dangers. Carrying cash is a danger all its own—especially if a person is searched by occupation soldiers.

Yet other partners were members of a long-established and highly regarded civil-society group that Israel designated a terrorist organization in 2021—part of its demonic project to shred Palestinian society and life by all means imaginable. These women take personal risks—unthinkable in the West—to provide services for children and women in rural areas. One of my fondest memories is meeting them at a Ramallah coffeehouse.

From start to finish this project was held together and accomplished on trust. And the trust of which I write is a connection and bond between people spread across continents. Every person who made a donation did so on trust—trust that doesn’t stop now that the playground is finished, but that will reverberate into the future.

The playground transformed the kindergarten. It has and will touch and shape the life of every child who uses it. The smiles you see in these pictures—rare smiles indeed—are proof of that.

■

The picture below shows the kindergarten as it was before the construction began. The adjacent vacant lot (right photo) is the site of the playground.

The finished project included repairs to the kindergarten’s roof and bathroom, a new septic tank, concrete work, a sunshade, artificial grass, outdoor play equipment, and indoor educational board games.

Al–Mughayyir endures frequent attacks by settlers and soldiers. In 2025 two teenaged boys were martyred in separate shootings, one of which I reported on here. That same year nearly all of its agricultural land was stolen—over 42,000 dunams (the equivalent of 10,380 acres) of farm and grazing land, olive orchards, vineyards, wheat fields, almond tress, greenhouses, and more. An estimated 3,000 olive trees were uprooted during a major military incursion at the end of August, as reported here. During that same operation a road was carved through the farmland to a hilltop overlooking the village where a new settlement is under construction.

The picture below shows one of the two kindergarten’s classrooms after soldiers ransacked it in the August military raid. Appreciate anew the miracle of a playground in this environment.

The day-to-day experience of these children is one of fear, anxiety, and the constant threat of violence. The smiles you see on these faces are all the more precious. The kindergarten’s FaceBook page is full of videos showing children learning and at play—smiling and laughing. I encourage you to take a few minutes and look at it; click on any video with artificial grass to see the playground. You can watch two of my favorites here and here. Another fun video shows the transformation of the playground as the equipment is installed. And enjoy the Arabic music!

The following message was appended to a post on the school’s Facebook page when the playground was completed. I’ve taken small liberties with the translation and will let this expression of gratitude stand as this piece’s final words:

We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to all the donors and people who contributed and provided play equipment for our wonderful kindergarten. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your unlimited dedication and giving. Your efforts have been a catalyst for achievement and are a symbol of sincerity. We cherish what you have given and its positive impact. May Allah place it in the balance of your good deeds.

This was published simultaneously on Winter Wheat.

Everything I write is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting my work. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. You can also share this report. Thank you.

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He who sows injustice will reap sorrow. 
—Proverbs 22:8

25 FEBRUARY—When Thomas Friedman tells readers of the Zionist-aligned New York Times that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza—altogether its unhinged nationalist messianism—threatens to destroy Israel, you know the Zionist project is in trouble.

The greatest existential threat to Israel, as Friedman has it, is not the Islamic Republic of Iran but Netanyahu and his deranged coalition of “messianic zealots, Arab-hating nationalists and anti-modern ultra-Orthodox Israelis.” Read Friedman’s words again and you appreciate them even more for where they appeared.

It’s a fine thing, of course, that Friedman understands this and says so in the pages of The Times. But he fails to understand that Netanyahu, like Trump, is symptom and not cause.

Unable as he is to repudiate the Zionist project, Friedman requires a scapegoat. He cannot yet see, or perhaps refuses to admit, that the twin ideologies destroying Israel—Zionism and Jewish supremacism—have so thoroughly poisoned and corrupted Israeli Jewish society that the country cannot and does not deserve to be saved.

Numerous of Friedman’s readers are of clearer minds. Here is a comment posted under the name Citizen:

As usual, Friedman lays the onus for Israel’s behavior on Netanyahu. But he has been elected five times, and is now the longest-serving prime minister in the history of the country. Israel’s policies have the support of most Israeli Jews, and when Netanyahu exits the stage, these policies will continue.

A Canadian reader using the pseudonym Fruminous Bear reminds us of the shocking extent of racism in Israel:

Tamir Sorek, a professor at Penn State, commissioned a survey of the opinions of Jewish Israelis about the Palestinian population in Gaza and in Israel. The survey was conducted in March 2025 by an Israeli polling firm, Geocartography Knowledge Group. The views of 1,005 Israeli Jews, ranging from secular to ultra religious were sampled and recorded. Among the results:

¶ 82 percent of respondents wanted all Palestinians expelled from Gaza.

¶ 56 percent of respondents wanted Arab citizens of Israel expelled from the country.

¶ 47 percent of respondents wanted all Palestinians in Gaza to be killed after the I.D.F.’s conquest of the enclave.

“In sum,” Fruminous concludes, “the problem Mr. Friedman has laid bare is not simply a consequence of Netanyahu's practices. It is also a consequence of the way a large percentage of Jewish Israeli's view Palestinians as less than human.”

The Zionist project is in trouble, to put this reader’s point another way, because it is a poison that corrupts the humanity of its own adherents—Jewish, Christian, secular. Gaza is proof of this. So is the ongoing ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank.

But look closely: Every act of violence perpetrated against Palestinians is actually an indication of weakness, simultaneously an expression of fear and desperation. Israel terrorizes its neighbors and inflicts cruelty wherever it goes—not because it’s strong, but because it’s afraid.

I read fear, not confidence, in the events I will now describe. And I read fear, not principle—and certainly not humanity or compassion—in the countless Tom Friedmans among us.

■

As regular readers of West Bank Alerts know, I publish frequent updates on the situation in various villages, among them Kisan, a village of 845 people—430 of whom are children—located 15 kilometers southeast of Bethlehem. Many of these alerts are made possible by my contact Adnan Al–Abayat, who has documented settler violence in and near Kisan for many years, often at significant personal risk.

Adnan’s reports from Kisan are a snapshot of what’s happening throughout the West Bank, in every town and village in what little remains of rural Palestine. Kisan isn’t unusual or exceptional. For this reason as well, Adnan’s work is invaluable. It exposes Israel’s criminality and the acceleration of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Kisan may be one small village, but it tells a much larger story.

In this past year, what little remained of Kisan’s historic land has been stolen in its entirety. It was seized dunam by dunam (a dunam being slightly less than a square kilometer) over the course of many years, as the village was surrounded by illegal settlements and outposts. Because I wanted to be certain that I had this right—that all of the land is gone—I texted Adnan asking, “Has all of Kisan’s land been stolen? Is there anything left outside of the village?” This was his reply:

Nothing remains outside of Kisan, and now the most difficult stage is targeting the village itself and its outskirts.

This is what Adnan now documents, the final stage of the ethnic cleansing of Kisan.

Grazing and agricultural land held in common by the people of Kisan for generations—indeed, for centuries and millennia before even a village was there, land that supported, fed, and sustained them—has been taken by Jewish settlers, planted with the blue star of David, claimed for “the Jewish state.”

The village itself is now under almost daily attack by Jewish shepherds and violent gangs, supported and protected by Israeli soldiers. Their goal is to empty Kisan and seize it for themselves. Kisan shepherds, desperate to graze their animals, risk arrest and attack by grazing their sheep on land adjacent to the village—land that has been overgrazed and that settlers are now poisoning with chemicals.

In what follows I share numerous of Adnan’s texts, photos, and videos dating from 31 January through mid-February. Not to be missed for its significance is the almost tedious monotony in Adnan’s documentation: It captures the relentless rhythm of ethnic cleansing. Insistent, persistent, repetitive, this is, like torture, meant to break its victims.

And this relentless cruelty is precisely what Thomas Friedman and all Zionist apologists miss—or overlook, or shrug off, or tacitly approve. Their concern is Israel’s survival and geopolitical dominance. Friedman is troubled more by the blowback deriving from Israel’s behavior, not—read the column again—by the suffering of Palestinians. He’s worried about its consequences for Israel’s security and “the security of Jews all over the world.” The latter is now a legitimate concern, certainly. But I propose we recognize a significant distinction: Is Friedman concerned with the Zionist regime’s brutality or with the damage Zionist brutality does to Israel’s reputation?

■

Bear witness with me once again.

31 January.

Text from Adnan:

Settler herders attacked village shepherds this afternoon in the only remaining area they have left on the western side of Kisan.

The following screenshots were taken from videos of settlers on all-terrain vehicles and with their herds. They have hundreds of dunams of stolen land but drive their sheep and vehicles as close to the village as possible.

■

2 February.

Text from Adnan:

In the southeastern part of the city, citizen Zakaria Warad is subjected to constant harassment by settler herders on a daily basis, who bring their flocks of sheep to the side of his house, vandalize his property, and provoke him as part of their terrorist practices aimed at restricting the residents and displacing them.

This video is further documentation of Jewish shepherds bullying and provoking residents by grazing their animals as close to their homes as possible.

■

4 February.

Text from Adnan:

Settler harassment and attacks against the residents of Kisan village continue daily. Settlers released their flock of sheep near the home of citizen Zakaria Warad as part of a policy of harassment and provocation practiced by settler groups in the area, further exacerbating the suffering of its residents without any deterrent.

The first video below, shot through a chain-link fence, shows a settler grazing his sheep next to a home. In the second video a settler drives his all-terrain vehicle next to the village. These vehicles are are given to the settlers by the Zionist regime and are routinely used to harass Palestinians.

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8 February.

Text from Adnan:

Harassment continues against the residents of Kisan village in its southeastern part, where settler herders continue their attacks on land next to homes with the aim of restricting, provoking, confiscating those lands and depriving the owners of those lands of their right to access them.

The above photo shows sheep belonging to a settler (circled in green) next to a Kisan residence. The video below shows the settler bringing his flock hard by the house; you can hear the voices of two Palestinian children. Imagine the impact of this on children. Imagine their lives.

■

11 February.

Text from Adnan:

Attacks of settler herders against the citizens in the southeastern part of Kisan village continue unabated and have become a daily occurrence.

Even the settler’s dogs attack homes and prevent citizens from approaching.

■

13 February.

Text from Adnan:

This afternoon, settler attacks against the residents of Kisan village continued. Armed settlers chased villagers away, preventing them from grazing their livestock on lands adjacent to the village and bringing settler shepherds to the area.

The photo above on the left shows an armed settler on horseback; to the right are Jewish herders accompanied by their armed and mounted guard.

■

13 February.

Text from Adnan:

Citizen Zakaria Warad discovered today that settlers had sprayed the grass and some bales of straw with unknown chemicals.

The use of chemicals by settlers to poison Palestinian land is consistent with Zionist scorched-earth policies in Palestine and throughout the region. Israel has recently been spraying the herbicide glyphosate in southern Lebanon and on the Syrian border at levels 20 and 30 times the recommended concentration as reported by the U.N., France24, the BBC, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera.

Glyphosate, a clear liquid, is frequently mixed with a blue dye so it’s application is visible. Given the blue tinge in the above photos, and Israel’s practice of using it, it’s likely the poison used in Kisan is glyphosate. A contact who monitors human rights abuses in al–Khalil (a.k.a. Hebron) told me recently that chemicals are being sprayed elsewhere in the West Bank. This is an attack on the local food supply and amounts to what I will call ecocide.

■

16 February.

Text from Adnan:

The occupation forces arrested a young man, Muhammad Saleh Al–Abayat, while he was with his sheep near the village houses. The arrest was made at the request of settlers.

I asked Adnan what reason was given for the arrest. This was his reply:

The reason is that the settler was afraid because Muhammad was wearing a Bedouin scarf on his head. He was wearing a black keffiyeh, and part of his neck and face was covered. Shepherds often wear head coverings, and sometimes nose coverings, to protected them from dust, dirt, and harmful flies found on the sheep.

The following photo showing Muhammad (seated on the ground, to the right within the red square) wearing a Bedouin scarf on his head.

Muhammad was blindfolded, put into an armored vehicle, and taken away. He was held for four hours, spoke to no one, and was released in a desolate area some 20 kilometers from Kisan and left to walk home. All of this, as Adnan said, “to appease some settlers this afternoon.”

The armed settler in the photo below (to the right) was among those who summoned the occupation soldiers.

■

20 February.

Text from Adnan:

Settler gangs chased the sheep of residents in the village today as part of the ongoing harassment and provocation to which the village of Kisan is subjected.

The photos below need little explanation. A gang of settlers drove through the village in an all-terrain vehicle and chased a flock of sheep. This is a common form of harassment that causes extreme stress in the animals. It’s particularly detrimental when they are malnourished because they cannot graze.

■

23 February.

Text from Adnan:

This morning, the so-called Israeli Civil Administration notified four houses in the village to halt construction. This is part of a new escalation targeting inhabited homes in the village.

■

Just this month the Zionist regime took new steps to seize control over the West Bank in a move that amounts to de facto annexation, as reported here by +972. Among other measures, it resumed the “settlement of land title” process, which was suspended in 1967. All Palestinians in Area C—60 percent of the West Bank—with a claim to land must provide documentation proving ownership. Failing that, their land, homes, and businesses will be confiscated by Israel.

Proving ownership is difficult in the West Bank. Less than one third of land was officially registered during the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate era. Home demolition is set to explode. The village of Kisan, which is located in area C, will not survive unscathed, if at all.

But Kisan’s fate, whatever it is, will surely be Israel’s as well. This is the truth we must not forget. The same Bible used by messianic Zionist Jews to justify their racism and brutality warns in the Ketuvim, which includes Proverbs, of the bitter harvest to come.

The Zionist state cannot commit genocide and terrorize its neighbors with impunity and hope for a secure and happy future. Israel, as Thomas Friedman knows, cannot ultimately survive as an isolated and despised nation. Zionism, and all those who cling to it, will be its undoing. If Friedman and the liberal Jews for whom he speaks care about the Jews of the world they should repudiate Zionism and the genocidal “Jewish state” it spawned.

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11 FEBRUARY—Texts arrived from a West Bank friend on Sunday afternoon, 8 February. Adnan al–Abayat, a frequent source of these Alerts, sent videos and photographs showing Jewish settlers vandalizing a small rural mosque in the governorate of Bethlehem.

Each attack and provocation of this kind by settlers or soldiers is an intentional escalation in the Zionist project to force Palestinians from their land—to make life so impossible and miserable that they leave.

Here is Adnan’s text:

In a new and dangerous move, settlers this Sunday afternoon brought their sheep onto the land of the old mosque’s endowment and vandalized it. The mosque was desecrated by the settlers and their sheep. Prayer carpets were stolen and numerous copies of the Qur`an were burned.

The mosque, more than fifty years old, is located between Adnan’s village of Kisan—located 15 kilometers southeast of Bethlehem—and al–Minya, one and a half kilometers to the north of Kisan. It serves both communities and is used during the holy month of Ramadan and each week for salat al-jum`ah, the Friday afternoon sermon and prayer—mandatory for Muslim men.

The vandals can be seen in the following video—three settlers near an all-terrain vehicle with a flock of sheep to their left. The Zionist regime provides settlers with ATVs knowing they are used—indeed, intending them to be used—to harass and attack Palestinian shepherds and communities.

Uppermost in my mind on Sunday afternoon: No Palestinian Christian or Muslim would desecrate a Jewish synagogue in this or any other fashion. Of that I am certain. They have far too much respect for Judaism to violate or befoul sacred Jewish space.

There are no limits to the depraved and self-serving behavior of the Zionist occupiers in the land of Palestine. This is true for settlers, soldiers, politicians, and, sadly, also a majority of Israeli Jews. Such is the poison of racism and Jewish supremacism.

Israelis defile Judaism and destroy themselves with each act of violence, oppression, and humiliation committed against the indigenous people of Palestine. This is a sad and terrible thing to watch. But we must watch it, bearing witness.

■

It strikes me as a coincidence worth mentioning, a juxtaposition much worth considering, that on the very same Sunday Adnan recorded these events more than one-third of Americans, an average of 125 million people, watched the Super Bowl. Viewership peaked in the second quarter, when 137.8 million people tuned in. In the final days before the game, tickets went for an average price of $3,500 to $4,500. Prime seats in the lower levels sold for $40,000. V.I.P. seats were available for $60,000.

I am compelled to mention this spectacle, unrelated as it may seem. This extravaganza of consumerism and corporatized entertainment is a significant national event, if you don’t choke on that thought. I did not watch the game; figuratively speaking, I watched people watching the game. I noted, as I do each year, the curious national obsession with this sporting event. And then the text and videos came from Adnan. The unrelated instantly seemed to me related.

To my question, Why is the Super Bowl an important national cultural event?, A.I. provided a reply revealing for what it says about the state of American decline.

The Super Bowl is a premier American cultural event, acting as an unofficial national holiday that transcends sports by merging entertainment, advertising, and community. It serves as a unifying . . . spectacle that brings diverse audiences together, highlights American values, and showcases top-tier musical performances and commercials.

How far America has fallen that entertainment and advertising substitute for genuine community. But, taking this a little further, this sideshow serves a greater purpose.

As attention in America focused on the Super Bowl, a fleet of U.S. warships assembled in the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf—Trump’s big, beautiful armada—preparing to launch a military strike on Iran, a country that is in no way a threat to the United States. Bibi Netanyahu is even now meeting with Trump, by all appearances to urge the attack— which will be a gross violation of international law that will undermine U.S. security and whatever legitimacy the country might still enjoy. Israel gives the orders and hastens America’s decline. Who needs enemies?

As America’s downward slide accelerates and our basic civil liberties are eroded, bread and circuses are ever more important. Entertainment and distraction. From the Super Bowl to our every military aggression.

In the West Bank, holding onto life, family, and community—and let’s add “Palestinian values”—is an everyday struggle. But life in Occupied Palestine, however difficult and tenuous it is, is anything but trivial. Perhaps for that reason the people retain their dignity.

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2 FEBRUARY—The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank continues at increased pace and the world remains silent—as it remains silent on Gaza. Israel’s project to steal all Palestinian lands in the West Bank proceeds. Settler attack on Palestinians remain a daily occurrence. Palestinians are arrested and disappear into Israel’s sprawling network of torture facilities.

Throughout the West Bank the story everywhere is the same. Israel continues to tighten the noose around villages to force Palestinians to flee or relocate into urban enclaves which are encircled by settlements and controlled by roadblocks. The apartheid state controls every inch of Palestinian movement.

My friend and contact from the village of Kisan, Adnan al–Abayat, continues to document the situation there even as what he reports remains predictably the same. Indeed, the sustained assault on Kisan, located 15 km southeast of Bethlehem, has been going on for years as the community was slowly encircled by settlements and illegal outposts. On Tuesday of last week he reported that the last of the agricultural land surrounding the village has been appropriated and cynically classified as a closed military Zone. Most Palestinian land has been stolen in just this manner.

Adnan sent the following by text,

The Israeli army is preventing residents of Kisan village from accessing the northern part of the village, known as Wadi al-Awaj, claiming it is a closed military zone. Over the past two days, the army has attempted to arrest several residents and today reiterated its warnings against entering the area, while allowing settler shepherds to graze their flocks there. This has effectively isolated the village from its surrounding land.

Any attempt by Kisan residents to graze their animals is met with violence. Over the weekend Adnan reported that settlers attacked village shepherds when they attempted to graze their animals on the western edge of the village. In grotesque displays of racist chutzpah, Jewish settlers graze their animals on Kisan’s land bringing their herds next to village homes as a further form of harassment and intimidation.

With no land left for grazing, what will the people of Kisan do was a question I asked Adnan. Will people leave? I wanted to know.

“I don’t think the people of Kisan will leave now,” was his reply. “They will remain steadfast in the village regardless of the consequences. There is no alternative for them but Kisan.” Even as communities are squeezed people refuse to leave.

Palestinians will not give up their land. It may be stolen from them. They might be driven from the land through violence. They can be bombed and massacred as they have been in Gaza, but still they remain.

■

How, I asked another friend, do Palestinians hold onto hope? Her reply, which I share below, gives hope an altogether different meaning, one imbued it with the strength of determination, refusal to accept subjugation, and insistence on the right to remain on their ancestral land.

Palestinians believe that the colonial reality imposed on them cannot be accepted or endured, it must be confronted. The presence of hope does not mean adapting to this reality; it means rejecting it. Hope here is not an emotional feeling, but a conscious stance and an act of resistance.

To have hope is to refuse the normalization of this reality. And in order to confront it, hope must remain, because without hope there is no life and no steadfastness. Hope affirms our inner existence, prevents us from breaking, and gives us the strength to continue.

Hope grows from the act of rejecting this reality. Its absence, on the other hand, implies acceptance and that is a tragedy. All our steadfastness is built on hope, and all our continuation depends on it. That is why hope must remain alive, no matter how harsh the reality is.

At the same time, the daily hardships people live under—occupation, poverty, loss, repression, and closed horizons—understandably shape their emotional state. It is true that you may see people who appear exhausted, discouraged, or even hopeless on the surface. This does not mean that hope is absent; it means that hope exists under pressure.

As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “We love life if we find a way to it.” This love of life is not denial of pain, it is resistance to it. People may look tired, but they continue to live, to love, to raise their children, to plant their land, and to remain. And this, in itself, is hope.

And then she shared the following poem.

“And We Love Life”

And we love life if we find a way to it.
We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees.

We love life if we find a way to it.
And we steal from the silkworm a thread to build a sky and fence in this departure.

We open the garden gate for the jasmine to go out as a beautiful day on the streets.
We love life if we find a way to it.

And we plant, where we settle, some fast growing plants, and harvest the dead.
We play the flute like the color of the faraway, sketch over the dirt corridor a neigh.
We write our names one stone at a time, O lightning make the night a bit clearer.

We love life if we find a way to it…

—Mahmoud Darwish

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31 DECEMBER—A New Year’s greeting arrived this morning from a friend in New Askar refugee camp, in the West Bank governorate of Nablus. It’s a powerful message of hope, and I publish it below with permission and of necessity anonymously.

May each of us do our very best by whatever means at our disposal, however great or small the effort, to make peace a reality in the land of Palestine in 2026.

—C.M.

■

A message from New Askar refugee camp.

Happy New Year to all.
A year of love and peace from the land of war and pain.
From the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem.
And from Jerusalem, the land of peace.
Freedom and justice for the children of Palestine.
With all my love.

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29 NOVEMBER—Video documentation raced like wildfire through the West Bank on Thursday, showing Israel security forces shooting two unarmed Palestinians in the city of Jenin. Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37 were shot at close range after having surrendered and while lying on their stomachs.

Were Abdallah and Asaasah actually resistance fighters—and we may never know whether or not they were—they should have been treated as prisoners of war and afforded all the legal protection demanded by international law. Instead they were identified as “terrorists.”

Texts and video, sent by my friend Adnan, arrived on WhatsApp midafternoon as I arrived at friends for Thanksgiving dinner. I watched before getting out of the car. And watched it again, nearly unable to believe what I was seeing. The sadistic audacity of Jewish Israelis should forever make the word chutzpah an obscenity.

In the video a backhoe is seen breaking open a large overhead door to a concrete building. Abdallah and Asaasah emerge crawling on their knees, hands held high. Both men lift their shirts to show they’re unarmed. They’re are searched, kicked, ordered back into the building and summarily shot. The backhoe operator then brings the metal door down onto their bodies.

What I witnessed then and you witness here are extrajudicial killings. Videos of this event have circulated widely. In this West Bank Alert my intention is to put these murders in the larger context missing from most press reports.

As per usual, and as reported by Haaretz, security forces claimed the two men were terrorists,

According to the police and the IDF, the two Palestinians, who belonged to a terror organization in the city, had thrown explosive devices and fired at Israeli forces in the past.

End of story. Two terrorists killed in the West Bank. What could be more reasonable or justified? National Security Minister and Zionist freak Ben-Gvir expressed enthusiastic support for the killings. “The fighters acted exactly as expected of them,” he said, “terrorists must die.”

One more time: “Terrorists must die.”

Haven’t we heard this before? Let us give these events their proper history.

The same justification was given two weeks ago to explain the murder of 17-year old Hassan Sharkasi, shot while sitting with friends in Askar refugee camp near Nablus, and reported here in West Bank Alerts.

Westerners are so used to thinking of Arabs as terrorists and terrorists as deserving of death—thanks to decades of racist indoctrination and our own decades-long war on terror—that Israel’s policies vis-à-vis Palestine have long seemed reasonable—until the obviously unreasonable excesses of the Gaza genocide—too visible, too sadistic, altogether too much to ignore.

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The Zionist state is on a roll as it moves to realize its project of Greater Israel and steal what land remains. Three weeks ago, on 10 November, the Knesset voted by a margin of 39 to 16 to carry forward a bill legalizing the execution of Palestinians accused of “terrorist” activity. The Floutist reported on this vote here.

While the Knesset has yet to finalize its indecent and inhumane legislation, it appears on the way to becoming de facto policy among the security forces. We must understand the murders of Abdallah and Asaasah in this context. We can expect the murder of Palestinians in the West Bank to accelerate. Arrests will be increasingly unnecessary as the number of field executions increase. Having perverted all meaning of law, the lawless state will advance its agenda unhindered by legal, to say nothing of moral, concerns.

On Wednesday, 26 November, the day before Asaasah and Abdallah were murdered, the Israel Occupation Forces launched a “broad counterterrorism” operation in the West Bank as reported by Haaretz.

Forces entered villages, waterlines were cut, military helicopters fired at people. Leaflets asserting that the area had become a “haven for terrorists” were distributed in the area. All of this to prevent a potential flare-up of violence in the West Bank, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz. One could almost laugh at the way Katz turns reality upside down.

The Palestinian right to armed resistance was long ago recast as terrorism. Any village or refugee camp can at anytime be accused of being a haven for terrorists. Anyone can at anytime be accused of terrorism—of throwing an explosive device, no evidence necessary—and shot.

The murders of Asaasah and Abdallah sparked outrage as local Palestinians made videos available. But outrage won’t stop the Zionist chutzpah state. And this crime, hardly unusual, was outrageous only in having been caught on film.

At writing, we are once again invited to accept as credible that the Israeli military is investigating the Israeli military. And the Western press, most notably the Zionist-controlled New York Times, encourages this.

■

We must understand—we who live in the West—that our future and fate are tied to Palestine. Our rights to free speech and protest are rapidly being criminalized by Zionist forces within our own countries. We, too, are increasingly being labeled “terrorists.” Palestine, as others have pointed out, is the laboratory experiment wherein the limits of power will be determined—if there are any, and increasingly it seems there may be none.

Palestine is our future. Its fate will be ours.

Everything I write is freely available. If you appreciate what you read, please consider supporting my work. I rely entirely upon reader support. You can become a paid subscriber by clicking on the button below. You can “buy me a coffee.” You can send a one-time, monthly, or yearly donation via PayPal. Or you can support me on Patreon. You can also share this report. Thank you.

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18 NOVEMBER—Zionist Occupation Forces killed a 17-year old boy in Askar refugee camp on Saturday evening, 15 November. Askar abuts the city of Nablus and, like all camps, is frequently raided.

I received word of the murder of Hassan Sharkasi from a friend—whose name I cannot share—who knows the family and knew the boy. The first text arrived in the early hours of Sunday morning. It was time-stamped 1:29 (EST) and was the first thing I saw when I turned on my cellular phone.

It said simply,

A sad day in the camp. The martyrdom of 17-year-old Hassan al–Sharkasi in Askar camp.

A longer text and more photos soon arrived. The pictures showed Hassan’s body as it was carried to the cemetery. In Islam, burials happen quickly—within twenty-four hours of death and during daylight:

Life is especially precarious for men and boys in the West Bank. Occupation forces view their very existence as a threat and provocation and they’re routinely targeted for shootings and arrests.

My friend’s second text explained the circumstances of Hassan’s killing,

Last night, 17-year-old Hassan Sharkasi was sitting with his friends in the refugee camp. They were simply talking and spending a quiet evening together, just like any teenagers would.

But the calm didn’t last.

Suddenly, Israeli soldiers stormed the camp, spreading through the streets and turning a peaceful night into chaos. Hassan and his friends were not involved in anything—no confrontation, no activity, nothing. They were just sitting there.

I used to wonder and ask my friends and contacts what had prompted an arrest or shooting. It was inconceivable to my mind—shaped by being white and western—that anyone could be shot or arrested without cause.

But to ask this would be to pose the wrong question.

Palestinians are shot and arrested all the time simply for being Palestinian. Moreover, there is never a situation in which the shooting or arrest by an Israeli soldier of a Palestinian, on Palestinian territory, is legal under international law.

Zionist forces have no legal authority anywhere in Occupied Palestine and no right to be there. On the contrary, Palestinians do have a right to resistance, including a right to armed resistance under international law. Israeli forces have no right to self- defense on Palestinian land. Nonetheless, they kill and arrest Palestinians with complete impunity because no one stops them. And because they have the backing of the United States.

Haaretz reported Hassan’s murder as a bulleted item in a long list that landed in my inbox Sunday afternoon. What’s interesting is all that Haaretz got wrong. It’s important that we take note of all that Haaretz got wrong because its information came from the people who murdered Hassan—the occupation army.

Here’s what Haaretz reported,

A 19-year-old was killed by IDF gunfire during an overnight raid in a refugee camp in Nablus, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah reported. The IDF said that soldiers shot and killed a “terrorist” who “hurled an explosive device toward the soldiers” during activity in the area of Nablus.

The falsehoods embedded in this report—three of them—are intentional and significant. Taken together, they are the basis of a legal justification for the murder of a child. Israel has long twisted its legal framework to justify the imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians.

Two years was added to Hassan’s age making him an adult by legal definition, rather than a child. It matters not whether the falsehood was actually reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry or reported to have been reported by the Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority—which oversees the Health Ministry—is thoroughly corrupted, ultimately powerless, and has long collaborated with the Zionist regime.

A 17 year-old sitting with his friends on a Saturday evening was transformed by the occupation army into a terrorist who threw an explosive device. Case closed. Nothing to see here.

Israeli soldiers killed a terrorist. What could be more rational or justifiable?

■

On Monday last week, 10 November, the Knesset voted by a margin of 39 to 16 to carry forward a bill legalizing the execution of any Palestinian it deems to be a “terrorist.” The Floutist reports on this vote here.

Two more readings of the bill and two more votes on it will take place before it is passed into law. And when it is passed into law, as almost certainly it will be, a lot more Palestinians will be designated as terrorists and summarily executed.

This is the context in which we must understand Hassan’s murder and the lies told about him.

■

Remember Hassan. Remember that he was 17. Remember that he was hanging out with friends when an Israeli sniper killed him.

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4 NOVEMBER—Settler violence continues to intensify throughout the West Bank. Let us continue to bear witness to the suffering of our Palestinian brothers and sisters and to the crimes of the “Jewish state.” Join me in this purpose.

On Saturday morning, 1 November, I received a text from my friend and contact Adnan al–Abayat, who lives in the village of Kisan, 15 km southeast of Bethlehem. He sent two videos that were then circulating in Palestinian social media. What you see in them is further evidence of the ethnic cleansing under way, a project being carried out largely by settlers with the blessing and protection of the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv.

In the first video you see cars and equipment set on fire in the village of Kafr Qaddum in the northern West Bank governorate of Qalqiya. Arson—a form of economic warfare—is routinely used to terrorize Palestinians and destroy olive groves, vehicles, businesses, and homes.

The following video shows settlers entering an enclosed sheep pen and killing lambs. This attack occurred on the outskirts of the village of as–Samu in the South Hebron Hills. The slaughter of Palestinian animals—sheep, goats, dogs, chickens, donkeys—is an attack on the economic and food security of Palestinian families and communities. This incident, which was reported in Haaretz and The Times of Israel, was unusual only in that the brutality and depravity of the act was caught on a security camera.

The erasure of Palestinians from the West Bank is not a high-tech military operation. Fighter jets aren’t dropping 2,000 pound bombs. Drones aren’t shooting civilians. Not yet.

Instead, it’s being conducted by Jewish Israeli civilians with sticks and stones, matches and gasoline, Molotov cocktails, all-terrain vehicles, and military-issue assault rifles distributed to settlers—courtesy of the United States.

This diabolic project is coordinated on every level with Zionist Occupation Forces who protect the settlers. It includes the mass arrest and imprisonment of Palestinians who are starved, tortured, and raped. It takes the form of strategic and systematic terrorism: the destruction of olive groves, wheat fields, and greenhouses, the slaughter of animals, the poisoning of wells, the beating of old people while they harvest olives, the random shooting of Palestinians of all ages. Areas of the West Bank are being turned into piles of rubble not unlike Gaza as backhoes and bulldozers demolish houses, community centers, and infrastructure.

Israel is driving Palestinians from rural communities and villages at an ever increasing pace as it steals more and more land. This won’t stop until Israel is forced to stop.

■

How, you might wonder, can Israel be stopped?

First and foremost: Stopping Israel will require stopping U.S. support for Israel. It is down to us—those of us who live in the U.S. The Zionist stranglehold on our government must be broken. We must demand that our representatives quit accepting money from the Israel lobbies. Whatever we can do we must do as a matter of dignity and to preserve our own humanity—however small the effort may seem.

We do not have to—and we must not—remain passive spectators to the crimes of the Israel-U.S. empire.

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29 OCTOBER—Texts have arrived from Palestinian friends with increasing frequency these past weeks, each one documenting an upsurge in the destruction of olive trees by Jewish settlers and the Zionist Occupation Forces throughout the West Bank.

Attacks on Palestinians and olive groves routinely escalate during the harvest season which begins mid–October. But the current number and intensity of daily assaults represents an unprecedented and ominous escalation of violence—further evidence that the Zionist regime is escalating its ethnic cleansing in pursuit of informal annexation of the remaining land of Palestine.

Why, you might wonder, do Zionists attack olive trees? Why do they destroy a tree revered in the Old Testament and sacred in the Jewish tradition? What motivates this pathological fixation?

Olives are a critical and substantial source of food and income for Palestinians. Most simply and obviously: The Zionist regime is starving West Bank Palestinians, economically and in actuality. But the Zionist obsession with destroying olive trees has less evident and darker psychological imperatives—covetousness and envy among them.

I have come to understand that beneath the seething hatred Zionist Israelis feel for Palestinians is longing—at bottom a wish to be Palestinian. I take these questions up later; keep them in mind as you read.

For this Alert, I compiled reports and visual documentation from five communities spread across the governorates of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron: Nahalin, al–Minaya, Sahba, Umm al–Khair, and al–Mughayyir.

As you will see, the quality of the videos and photographs is sometimes poor. Few Palestinians can afford top-of-the-line cellphones, and the events being documented are dangerous, chaotic, and stressful—not easily captured. Because Palestinians are increasingly arrested or beaten for documenting the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers, violent interactions are often filmed and photographed surreptitiously.

What you read and see below is a fraction of the violence destroying Palestinian communities across the West Bank. Look at these images carefully. These are historical documents of the crime of ethnic cleansing. They record the human rights violations of a genocidal apartheid regime as it appropriates the land of Palestine.

However difficult it is to look at this evidence of Israel’s crimes, it is our responsibility to bear witness. Not least because our country, those of us who are U.S. citizens, has long enabled the criminality and brutality of the Zionist state.

■

Nahalin.

Video documentation of an elderly man being beaten by a settler and three Israeli soldiers arrived Saturday afternoon, 25 October, in separate texts from different friends. The man and his wife were picking olives on their land in the village of Nahalin when they were attacked. Nahalin, 8 kilometers southwest of Bethlehem, is surrounded by the illegal settlements of Gvaot, Rosh Tzurim, Neve Daniel, and Betar Illit.

News circulates quickly through the West Bank via social media. This is a matter of survival. People need to know in real time whenever and wherever violence breaks out. They also need evidence of their innocence in case of arrest. Of necessity, Palestinians are forced to document their own victimization. All of these images form part of a collective digital archive, formal and informal, taken over years and decades—documentary evidence of Israel’s criminality. This effort is also for the sake of history and a future when this documentation may be presented in a court of law.

The following videos, taken from different angles, show the casual brutality of the attack. The man is hit on the head with an assault rifle and held down while a settler punches him. What you see here is entirely routine.

Palestinians are not allowed to protect or defend themselves from attack. Any form of self-defense is an impermissible act of resistance to Jewish domination—and grounds for arrest or worse.

■

Al–Maniya.

Video of another brutal assault arrived by text two hours later on the same day, Saturday, 25 October. Settlers attacked people picking olives in al–Maniya, a small village 9 kilometers southeast of Bethlehem. A man in his forties, Mahmoud Adbel Fattah al–Jabarin, was brutally beaten with stones and a heavy wooden stick. He was repeatedly kicked in the face and groin. Settlers opened fire on villagers who tried to come to his defense.

When Israeli police showed up they, the police, prevented a Palestinian ambulance from transporting Mahmoud to a hospital. Instead, they arrested Mahmoud. He was held overnight and released on Sunday. His arm had been broken. Late Saturday night, settlers returned and destroyed approximately sixty of Mahmoud’s olive trees under the cover of darkness.

Perpetrators of this attack are from an illegal outpost located on land belonging to the Arab community of al–Rashaida, near the Ma`ale Amos settlement. These same Zionist thugs, many of whom belong to Hilltop Youth, routinely attack the nearby communities of Kisan, al–Maniya, and al–Rashaida. Hilltop Youth is a religious Zionist settler youth group that establishes illegal outposts throughout the West Bank and stages violent attacks against Palestinians.

In the first of the following videos you see Mahmoud being beaten. The second video shows the damage to his olive trees.

The video below shows settlers at the entrance to the village prior to the attack. Several of them are armed. There appears to by an Israeli soldier among them. Zionist military forces routinely guard settlers as they attack Palestinians. Some of the settlers seen here are members of Hilltop Youth and were involved in an attack on Sabha early in October, as reported below.

Avi Ashkenazi, military correspondent for Maariv, the Hebrew-language edition of The Jerusalem Post, reported on Sunday, 26 October, that the Israel Defense Forces, backed by senior political figures, has informal agreements with the Hilltop Youth.

According to reservist testimony,

[T]he IDF would provide the Hilltop Youth with means of subsistence in illegal outposts and in return they would refrain from acting against IDF forces. Instead, they would only act against the Palestinians.

If Zionist forces feared harassment and attack from members of Hilltop Youth enough to strike a deal with the organization, imagine the terror this criminal gang unleashes on Palestinians.

■

Sahba.

On 15 October, settlers from Ma`ale Amos destroyed more than 70 trees on land located east of the settlement in an area known as the Sahba Escarpment. Sahba is part of the historic farming and grazing land belonging to the nearby village of Kisan, 11 kilometers southwest of Bethlehem.

A dozen mature trees were cut down while smaller trees were destroyed by sheep set loose to graze in the orchard. Compounding the tragedy, olives from an additional 160 trees that had yet to be picked were entirely destroyed. Settlers went through the grove beating trees with sticks and knocking olives to the ground. Only about 10 percent of the harvest remained unspoiled.

In the photo below, Zionist Occupation Forces talk with settlers responsible for the destruction. Shortly afterwards, Palestinian landowners were forced to leave while the settlers remained behind to do more damage.

The next day, 16 October, settlers returned and attacked villagers and landowners who were guarding the orchards. Both sides threw rocks, and settlers fired military-issue assault weapons at the Palestinians.

■

Umm al–Khair.

Before sunrise on the morning of 7 October, Zionist forces entered the Bedouin village of Umm al–Khair, 16 kilometer southeast of Hebron, and destroyed an entire olive grove. The trees were adjacent to the community center on the outskirts of the village. Umm al–Khair is one of numerous villages and Bedouin communities located in an area known as Masafer Yatta, an area featured in the film No Other Land.

In the video below, a soldier—right of center—can be seen uprooting a tree. Other soldiers stand around. The lights in the background are from the nearby settlement of Carmel. These are strategically located to shine into the village throughout the night, flooding the village with light as a form of harassment. Umm al–Khair is entirely surrounded by Carmel and frequently attacked by settlers.

During the operation, soldiers focused blinding lights on villagers to prevent them from documenting the destruction, as seen in the video below.

In the light of day, nothing could hide the damage seen in the following video.

An estimated 80 percent of the olive trees upon which the village depends for food security and economic survival were uprooted or cut down. Occurring as it did in the early hours of 7 October, this was almost certainly an act of revenge and collective punishment for Hamas’s prison break two years earlier from the concentration camp known as Gaza—an event Norman Finkelstein likens to a “slave revolt” and which he, and many others, refuses to condemn.

Footnote: On 28 July, in an incident widely reported in Western media, Awdah Hathaleen, a math teacher and activist, was shot and killed by Yinon Levi, an Israeli settler. A resident of the village, Hathleen, was standing in the yard of the community center filming as a backhoe destroyed a road belonging to the village. He was highly regarded and loved among Israeli peace activists and visiting internationals. Levi, notorious for his violence against local Palestinians, was among those few settlers sanctioned during Biden’s presidency and remains under sanction in the U.K. and the E.U. I share this to emphasize the extremity of the violence endured by the Bedouins of Umm al–Khair.

Yesterday, Tuesday 28 October, I received news that Umm al–Khair was issued demolition orders for fourteen buildings: the community center, a community greenhouse, and twelve homes. It’s difficult to see how the small village will survive.

■

Al–Mughayyir.

Some six weeks earlier, beginning on 21 August, Zionist Forces bulldozed farmland and uprooted an estimated 3,000 olive trees in the village of al–Mughayyir, 18 kilometers northeast of Ramallah, in an onslaught that last nearly a week. They were aided by settlers operating privately owned equipment. Soldiers occupied the village for four days, arrested and detained numerous residents, raided and ransacked homes, and destroyed vehicles. The entire village was locked down and roads were closed. Ambulances weren’t allowed in.

All of this occurred after a settler claimed he was shot near the illegal settlement of Adei Ad. The injury was reported to be minor and the allegation remains entirely unsubstantiated. But whether true or not the Z.O.F. seized the opportunity, as did the settlers, who participated in the destruction of land and trees.

A backhoe destroys olive trees in the video above. In the final seconds of the footage, the camera pans across the orchard revealing the scope of devastation. This was filmed in the first days of the assault.

In the screenshot below, backhoes in the distance cut a road into the hillside. In the foreground, bulldozers uproot olive trees.

The roar of bulldozers and backhoes could be heard day and night as Zionist fanatics worked around the clock destroying everything on the land: grape vineyards, almond and fruit trees, wheat fields, and of course olive trees, some of which were centuries old. They cut a road through the fertile farmland to a hilltop overlooking the village. A new settlement is already underway. Like every other Palestinian community throughout the West Bank, al–Mughayyir is now ringed by Jewish settlements in an ever tightening Zionist noose.

In the following video, a bored Israeli soldier, unaware he’s being filmed, can be seen damaging a parked car. I share this so you can see how casually Zionists engage in violence and the extent to which they are determined to make life unbearable and unlivable for Palestinians. Nothing is left undamaged.

Prior to 7 October 2023 the village of al–Mughayyir owned 42,000 dunams of farm and grazing land—the equivalent of 10,380 acres. Nearly all of it has since been stolen by settlers under the protection of Zionist forces.

Like most other rural communities, al–Mughayyir relies almost entirely on agricultural production and livestock as its main source of food and income. Families depend upon olive oil for their economic security and stability. Excess oil—beyond the amount a household needs for its own consumption—is sold each year from the annual olive harvest. This year there will be very little to harvest and, so, almost no oil production.

By any measure, the West Bank is under a starvation siege.

Footnote: It is in the village of al–Mughayyir that we raised money to build a kindergarten playground. The project is near completion and all that remains is to order the new playground equipment. The school’s two small classrooms were raided during the same prolonged attack at the end of August reported above. They were ransacked and school supplies were destroyed.

■

What drives the Zionist impulse to destroy olive trees and attack people as they harvest olives? I now return to this question.

In answer, I turn to a conversation I had with a young man named Saed at a community center in Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. It was 5 November 2024. My interpreter, Sadeel, was with me, and Saed was giving us a tour and relating the history of the camp.

“What’s the greatest threat to Israelis?” Saed asked.

We stood on the roof of the center gazing over the apartheid wall onto land planted with hundreds upon hundreds of olive trees. A large illegal settlement sprawled across the hilltop overlooking the massive grove.

I couldn’t possibly answer Saed’s question: It was rhetorical. Boys throwing stones?

“The olive tree,” he replied.

Olive trees are evidence of our historic presence on the land and our connection to the land. They’re a symbol of our resistance and sumud—steadfastness. Their roots go deep into the land and they’re green in every season.

The olive tree is like a beautiful bride. But she has a groom. Olive trees don’t grow by themselves. They need people to care for them.

All of those olives trees belonged to Aida camp,” Saed said as he pointed to the land beyond the barrier. “They built the wall between the camp and our olive groves, cutting us off from our trees and land.”

I looked across the wall. The olive grove was vast. It extended from the base of the wall nearly to the hilltop. There must have been thousands of trees. Aid camp would be prosperous today if its residents had access to their land and trees—if settlers hadn’t stolen it.

The hatred Zionists feel for Palestinians, the brutality with which they treat Palestinians, is driven by envy and resentment. In short: the sin of covetousness.

Israeli Jews hate Palestinians for what they are and what they have: an indigenous identity and ancient connection to the land. Here, as so often, we find that hatred and love are strange siblings. Israelis hate Palestinians for one primary reason: They want to be Palestinian. The only way European Israeli Jews can claim an indigenous identity for themselves is to steal it and erase all evidence of Palestinian presence from the land.

This is the evil of covetousness, envy, jealousy, and greed.

Olive trees, many of which date to the Roman times, are evidence of Palestinian presence on the land for millennia. Families gather during the olive harvest, generations of people working, eating, laughing together—celebrating an ancient culture and tradition. The very existence of olive trees is an affront to Israel, evidence of the fundamental lie that the Jewish state was founded upon: A land without people.

Zionist have been destroying olive groves in Palestine since European Jews first arrived. More than two million trees have been uprooted in Occupied Palestine, according to Saed. It’s a number I cannot confirm. But Drop Site News reported last week, on 20 October—almost a year after my conversation with Saed—that one million olive trees have been destroyed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

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4 SEPTEMBER—I recently delivered a talk at the annual Mut zur Ethik conference in Sirnach, Switzerland. Held each summer at the end of August and now in its thirty-third year, Mut zur Ethik, which translates as “courage for ethics,” brings together independent journalists, historians, diplomats, activists, scholars, and thinkers to discuss ethical responses to current affairs.

“Reason and Humanity” was the broad topic of this year’s conference. I considered this theme using the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank to illustrate the fundamental irrationality embedded in the Western project—the apotheosis of which is displayed in the sadism and barbarity of the Zionist state.

What follows is a slightly modified version of the original PowerPoint presentation. My full report on the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin community of Deir Alla is here.

—C. M.

I begin this presentation by showing you pictures of the community of Deir Alla. This was a small Bedouin gathering of seventeen families in the Governorate of Bethlehem. These families are the direct descendants of people who have lived as goatherds and shepherds in the same area for generations. One month ago, in the last week of July, Deir Alla was ethnically cleansed and completely destroyed.

What you are about to see are stark images of humanity and inhumanity, rationality and irrationality. I want you to consider these images in the context of our conference on reason and humanity. This is what the clash between reason and unreason looks like in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine.

Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank—is where the West comes face-to-face with who we are and what we’ve become, as Westerners and Western nations. And what we see, we Westerners, when we look at ourselves, is the fundamental irrationality embedded in the Western project since the beginning of colonialism.

■

The Bedouins of Deir Alla are closely associated with the nearby village of Kisan, located 15 km southeast of Bethlehem. Kisan is now completely surrounded by settlements and outposts.

The settlement of Ma’al Amos is a couple of km south of Kisan and is visible from the village. The Bedouin gathering of Deir Alla was roughly 3 km south and east of Ma’al Amos. It was from Ma’al Amos that settlers staged their attacks on Deir Alla.

Throughout this talk I use the terms settlement and settler but these are inadequate to convey the violence and criminality of Jewish settlers and the settlement project. This is a project of ethnic cleansing. Settlers are actively engaged in terrorizing, brutalizing, and displacing Palestinian communities in a process Jewish Zionists refer to as “renewing the land.”

■

In November of last year, I met a community activist in the village of Kisan, a man named Adnan al–Abayat. Adnan has been documenting settler violence for the past several years. His family was from Deir Alla and much of this talk is based on his reporting.

The picture above shows Deir Alla as it was before it was destroyed. Adnan sent the following text along with the photograph:

I remember when I was young in Deir Alla. I was 5 years old, and my father used to tell me about their life in this place. They used to live in caves and in the summer they would build tents from plastic and sheep hair. Then life developed and our houses became mobile homes, and then concrete block homes with metal roofs. But unfortunately we did not get to have our dream to have homes like other people. It was a joy during the past 5 years. Then it became an illusion and was lost within days.

Next to us was the cemetery of the dead in Deir Alla, where our great-grandfathers were buried from the Turkish period, and where my uncles and my grandmother were buried, and all who died from the village of Kisan. Now, too, the settlers have taken it over, and we have no other cemetery.

The photo above shows Adnan’s father with his herd of sheep and goats. It was taken during the spring.

The man in the upper right is Adnan. The other pictures are of two of his children. After Deir Alla was destroyed Adnan texted me saying: “Our life was somewhat beautiful despite the Occupation. We made happiness out of nothing.”

■

The upper right photo shows an illegal outpost near Kisan that was established in May. The young men pictures above parked their cars on a hilltop, set up a tarp, and began a campaign to terrorize local families and steal the surrounding land. This is typical of how an outposts begins. This gang almost certainly belongs to the Hilltop Youth, a violent settler group, whose members are often still in their teens.

In the lower right photo, the group is sitting on a hill above and near a Palestinian home. They’re spying on the family and letting their presence be known. In the photo on the left, they’re sitting in the remains of an old car that was left in a yard next to a house. This behavior marks the beginning of an escalation. These gangs typically break into homes, steal and destroy things, and threaten to kill the families. The harassment and violence increase until families are forced to leave.

■

The settler pictures above routinely harassed the families of Deir Alla by driving his animals into their yards. On the right he’s ducking behind a rock from where he spies on the family. The family knows he’s there. The settler wants the family to know he’s there. This is a cat and mouse game, a form of psychological harassment and bullying.

■

I’m going to show you a video of a settler attack on Deir Alla that took place on 24 May. At the beginning, settlers can be seen throwing rocks at a building where animals are kept. And indeed, numerous animals were killed during the attack.

The camera then moves to the right and focuses briefly on the valley below. Israeli soldiers stand near an armored vehicle protecting settlers as they attack the Bedouin homes. The soldiers fired live ammunition into the community as the attack began in order to force families inside their homes and to prevent them from defending themselves.

In rural areas, settlers form part of the front line in a war on West Bank Palestinians. The Israeli army operates through them. It arms the settlers and provides military cover.

The following video shows the same attack from another vantage point.

Attacks on Deir Alla continued to escalate. In mid-July, settlers threw molotov cocktails into one of the homes in the middle of the night while the family slept. Children were present. By this time, settlers were threatening to kill the families if they continued to stay. Finally, the decision was made to leave.

The community was evacuated over two days in the final week of July. Everything was removed from the homes and the doors were locked in the hope that one day the families would be able to return.

■

On 26 July the last families left Deir Alla. That night, in an event that was reported by Haaretz, settlers burned four of the houses including the home belonging to Adnan’s parents. The next day settlers brought in a backhoe and destroyed all but one of the remaining houses.

I will now read several of Adnan’s texts from that day:

Like all Bedouin communities, the families of Deir Alla were displaced after continuous attacks by settlers who tightened the noose on the people.

Memories of the past and the toil of years all wasted. Homes were destroyed and razed to the ground. We dug a well, land was planted with olives, figs, and other trees. We built sheep pens and purchased equipment. The value from years of toil exceeded 100,000 shekels. All of that is gone, as if it were a dream that passed in a few moments.

The people of Deir Alla left after a long period of harsh suffering, were forced to leave for a dark destination with no less suffering ahead than what they recently went through. They left behind memories swallowed in a land they never thought they would leave in this painful and hurtful way. We can only say, ‘God is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.’

In a separate text he wrote:

“An hour ago, I was with my mother. I saw her tears running down her cheeks, and she was asking me about the smallest things there, at her home. Are they still the same? Is there hope that we will go back?”

And in a final text he said,

“The settlers are keen on destruction and devastation so that there is no hope of return. But loss of home is not what hurts our hearts. It is also the land that we have loved and still love since childhood.”

■

One house that was still under construction, and that had not been lived in, was stolen by the same settler who had harassed the families for months with his herd of animals.

This is what the irrationality of the Zionist project looks like. This man (see photo above) is celebrating and thanking God for his success in destroying the lives of other people. This picture alone is why I’m talking to you in the context of this theme. There is no discussing Zionism or Israel as if it is a rational defensible project.

■

Now I want you to think about children and what happens to children in this kind of environment.

One week after the evacuation of Deir Alla I had a text exchange with Adnan’s wife, a woman named Sabah. I wanted to know how the children were doing. She sent me pictures of three drawings, one of which I share here with you.

This drawing (see photo above) shows a large yellow backhoe and a demolished house. Numerous dead animals are also depicted. The Arabic says, “The houses were burned and people were sad. They cried because they were powerless.”

The following week, Sabah gathered the children of Deir Alla at the small library in Kisan, were they spent several hours drawing together. She texted me afterward to report that the children were doing better.

In the photo above, a large backhoe is in the process of demolishing a home from which the Palestinian flag flies. An Arab family is gathered below the home. On the right side of the drawing, above an Israeli flag, an olive tree has been cut down and a sheep has been killed.

Israeli’s use backhoes to demolish Palestinian homes. For that reason they appear frequently in drawings done by children. Imagine the fear these large tractors provoke in a child whose home has been destroyed.

■

Now I want us to consider how the irrationality of Zionism is instilled in and expressed by Jewish children.

The following video shows three settlers harassing a Palestinian family and forcing them to leave their home. The man is dressed in military uniform and carries a military-issue weapon, he is accompanied by two teenaged boys. International volunteers are with the family to provide a protective presence.

The armed settler tells one of the international activists the family must leave their home or he, the settler, is going to [he makes a violent gesture]. The activists says, “Explain why, this is their house.” The settler replies, “Because of the violence.”

Another activist says, “Who is doing the violence towards a woman? Towards women? Why are you doing this? Why are you supporting this? How can you support this? Do you think this is normal?”

The settler replies, “Yes.”

The activist says, “It’s completely disgusting. It’s abnormal, this behavior. Are you serious?” At that point the youngest Jewish boy puts a camera into her face.

■

The following three images are screenshots from a video of another incident in which settlers harassed the same family. The boy with the side curls holds a stick. He’s the same boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood in the previous video. I’m showing you these pictures because settlers use their boys as attack dogs. The armed man stands back and tells the boy what to do.

This is called rage-baiting. The settlers are trying to provoke a reaction so they can call the I.O.F. and escalate the violence. Here the Jewish boy is focusing his aggression on the smaller Palestinian boy.

This is sociopathic behavior. This boy’s mind has been damaged if not destroyed. He’s been force-marched into a state of complete irrationality. He’s been taught to hate Palestinians and to take pleasure in tormenting and bullying them. In a few years he’ll go into the army. As a civilian he’ll carry an assault rifle.

How will he raise his children? How will peace be possible when each generation of Israeli Jews has been taught to fear and hate Palestinians and to see them as animals?

The pictures of Deir Alla show a people living a simple life, but also a meaningful and dignified life. This is a life connected to the land, culture, and traditions of Palestine. It is also a fundamentally rational life. Rational because it’s a way of living that relates to reality as it presents itself from day to day and over the course of generations. Rational also because it relies upon and expresses an inherited body of wisdom and knowledge.

By contrast, the videos and pictures of Jewish settlers show a people living and behaving in ways that are profoundly irrational and inhumane—to the point of criminality and madness.

This is the irrationality and madness of minds possessed by religious and ideological fanaticism: Messianic Judaism and Zionism, racism and Jewish-supremacism.

The settler project in the West Bank—and indeed the very creation of Israel—is irrational because it rejects established facts, history, and moment to moment reality. Instead, it uses brute force and violence to impose an imagined reality on the land and people of Palestine—a fantasy of European Jewish indigeneity in Palestine, a fantasy of a Jewish right to the land of Palestine, a fantasy of a right to a Jewish state. Indeed, a fantasy of a “greater Israel” that includes most of the Levant.

Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank embodies the quest for supremacy that infuses the Western project and in which “reason and humanity fall by the wayside,” to quote from this year’s Mut zur Ethik invitation. The very worst traits of the Western world, as led by the United States, are distilled and concentrated in the Zionist state and enacted on the bodies and lives of Palestinians. But also quite clearly on the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.

There is a path to peace but the world will not walk it until there’s a fundamental change in the West. In Palestine, the full force of Western militarism and imperialism has been deployed against a people who are stateless, who have no military, and no means to defend themselves. And for this very reason, it is in Palestine that the West will redeem itself or, failing, as it now does, condemn itself, its history, and its future.

Published simultaneously at Winter Wheat.

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16 AUGUST—Pale sunlight fills the yard beyond my windows, a breeze blows in through the screens. It carries a hint of autumn. I hear the sound of cars outside, all of them traveling too quickly along the road on which I live. I hear the sounds of laughter and children at play. These: The sights and sounds of an ordinary Saturday afternoon.

I begin this report in precisely this way to emphasize by contrast the fortunate normalcy of life when it is stable and peaceful against the utter abnormality and brutality of life lived under the Jewish state’s reign of terror.

I spent the first half of my Saturday afternoon contentedly reviewing budget and progress reports for a kindergarten playground in the village of al–Mughayyir. This project, as reported here, here, and here commenced in the fall of last year after a successful GoFundMe campaign.

Thanks to the generous donations of many readers of The Floutist and Winter Wheat, the fundraiser quickly reached its goal. When school begins in a few weeks, two classrooms full of five-year-olds will have a new playground and new play equipment for their modest kindergarten.

As I was texting with my project partners in the West Bank, finalizing the last dispersement of funds to pay for a new slide and merry-go-round, one of my colleagues sent a text announcing breaking news. The description was brief:

A martyr in al–Mughayyir.

The I.O.F. had just shot and killed someone in the village.

The following video records the moment when 18-year-old Hamdan Musa Abu Aliya was gunned down in a street in al–Mughayyir. He was unarmed and running and appears to have been shot in the back.

The shooting is recorded in the first second of the video as Abu Aliya runs down the street from right to left. The force of the shot throws his body forward. The terrible sound echoes through the village. We should witness this.

Shooting an unarmed teenager is never an act of self-defense. It’s target practice. It’s murder turned into perverse sport—killing as entertainment. It’s an act of naked sadism.

As reported to me, the I.O.F. soldiers responsible for this crime were almost certainly recently stationed in Gaza. These brigades are routinely cycled through the West Bank as a form of rest and relaxation—a break from committing genocide. And these soldiers, fresh from having perpetrated monstrous crimes against the people of Gaza, commit monstrous crimes against the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Palestine is not a state. It has no standing army. It’s population is entirely civilian.

Every five-year-old in the village of al–Mughayyir will have heard the shot that killed Hamdan Musa Abu Aliya. They will either be related to Abu Aliya, or they will know of him and his family. Some of them will be friends with his younger siblings.

These kindergartners will all know who killed Abu Aliya and how and why. Their parents will attempt to protect them, to focus their attention elsewhere, to keep them as safe and happy as possible. But they will know Abu Aliya was killed because he was Palestinian. And they will know that they too are targets.

Even so—because of this, indeed—the children of al–Mughayyir need to play and laugh and have moments in which they can be children.

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31 JULY—Six days after publishing “Zionist terrorism in the West Bank”—a report documenting settler attacks on the Bedouin community of Deir Alla—a text arrived announcing the evacuation of this tiny Palestinian herding community. It was Wednesday, 23 July.

Over the next couple of days and nights my friend and contact, Adnan al-Abayat, sent a stream of texts including videos and photographs documenting the ethnic-cleansing of Deir Alla. I share all of it below, and in Adnan’s voice—the voice of a Palestinian man reporting as his family and friends are forced from their homes and ancestral grazing land.

Adnan’s reporting is as close to the ground as it gets. We must hear such voices as often as this is possible. They bear witness to the brutal oppression and violence daily inflicted on the people of Occupied Palestine. We owe it to our Palestinian brothers and sisters to listen to what they tell us. We owe this out of care and respect for their humanity and indeed our own.

With each entry I include the time it was sent from the West Bank, time-stamped EEST, Eastern European Summer Time, the Time zone Palestinians reference. The interpolations are mine, provided for clarification, and are in italics.

I publish this with a heavy heart, weighted down by sadness for the families of Deir Alla and concern for their uncertain future.

May this report add to the weight that finally breaks Zionism.

—C. M.

■

Text thread begins, 23 July, 6:36 p.m., EEST: “We are in dire need of solidarity to stay with us all the time so that displacement does not occur.”

C.M.: “Is Deir Alla under threat of displacement?”

A.A.: “Correct. Starting tonight, livestock will be removed from the compound. The nature of the settlers is to kill the sheep of the community’s residents, which is their source of livelihood and for which they are very afraid.”

C.M.: “Where will you put the animals?”

A.A: “They will be placed in pens in Kisan village. Now I have left my job so that I can return to them [Deir Alla] and document what is happening, given that the settlers have built a residence next to them, only a few dozen meters away.”

The penning of animals within villages—to protect them from being stolen or killed—is now common. I’ve witnessed this in the villages of Umm al–Khair and al–Mughayyir. Without the ability to graze their animals, goats and sheep must be sold one-by-one to purchase fodder—an inferior feed. Grazing animals quickly become sick when penned in small areas. Slowly these herds, upon which people depend for food and economic security, are lost.

■

Text, 24 July, 2:00 a.m., EEST: “It is now 2:00 a.m. and we are still guarding what remains of the belongings in the houses in the Deir Alla gathering. Tomorrow we will continue to move the remaining properties. The houses have been evacuated of children and the elderly, leaving only the young people.”

The video below shows a trailer laden with possessions ready to be moved in the morning.

Text thread begins, 24 July, 3:19 a.m., EEST: “Tonight, a large portion of the contents of the houses was removed, along with the elderly, children, and women. The young men remained in the houses to protect them until they were completely emptied.”

C.M: “The houses of Deir Alla are being completely abandoned?”

A.A.: “Yes, for fear of theft or burning of its contents by settlers. Until now, we have not slept and are exhausted, and we are still awake for fear of erasure by the settlers who the army left behind and did nothing to stop it.”

In this photo below, Adnan keeps an overnight vigil to guard what remains in one of the homes. His legs are just visible.

In the following video, Adnan can be seen talking with Z.O.F. soldiers as residents pack to evacuate. As he explained in a follow-up query:

These soldiers were telling me that they would protect us from settler attacks, but after half an hour of conversation, they left the place and left the settlers free to carry out the sabotage.

The Arabic scrawled across the video is a common Muslim prayer: “God is sufficient to us, He is the best disposer of affairs.” In this way Muslim faithful leave judgment and all due punishment in the hands of God alone, no matter the degree of injustice that is suffered.

A.A.: “One of my cousins is tired and exhausted and is sleeping now.”

This photo of Adnan’s cousin is from the same night.

A.A.: “Frankly, after all these tragedies, I have lost hope that a good day will come. Because every day that comes is harder and worse than the day that passed. My children see tragedies and ask me why this is happening to us, and unfortunately I cannot answer.”

Text, 24 July, 3:13 p.m., EEST: The final message from Adnan on this saddest of days arrived twelve hours after the previous one. It consisted solely of videos and photos showing the last vehicles, loaded with belongings, to depart from Deir Alla. Thirteen families left that day. Four families remained, those farthest from the illegal Zionist settlement and outpost. These families evacuated over next two days, abandoning their homes.

This video shows the final departure on Thursday, 24 July.

■

Text thread begins, 25 July, 9:28 a.m., EEST: The message began with a series of photographs and videos of the now-abandoned homes. Adnan, a community activist and documentarian, had returned to Deir Alla. In the few hours these houses had been left empty, settlers had stolen the roof from the home of one of his relatives.

A.A.: “While he was away from home for 6 hours, settlers stole the roof of citizen Arif Ayesh Al-Abayat's house.”

Zionist settlers did additional damage breaking the protective screens covering windows—screens put in place to protect the Bedouin families from attack by Jewish settlers. See photo below.

Text thread begins, 25 July, 6:18 p.m., EEST:

C.M.: “How many families left Deir Alla yesterday?”

A.A.: “Thirteen families.”

C.M.: “How many families are still there?”

A.A.: “Four.”

■

Text thread begins, 26 July, 12:27 a.m., EEST: “The departure of the last families is imminent. These were the furthest from the settlers. Now the settlers can easily attack them after the displacement of the families who formed the frontline to repel the attacks. Soon there will be no one left.”

The following video shows the evacuation of another family just after midnight on Saturday, 26 July. As trailer beds are loaded with belongings and building materials, Adnan’s voiceover, as translated into English, says:

Right now the people are being displaced. A few moments ago an attack occurred.

The settlers continued to attack until all the families of Deir Alla left.

Text thread begins, 26 July, 1:24 a.m., EEST: “Today they seized one of the houses that was under construction.”

Adnan, still reporting and texting in the early hours of 26 July, even as the last families were being evacuated, next sent to me a remarkable photo from the day before. It shows a settler surrounded by his herd of goats, his arms raised high over head as if giving thanks to God as he claims a house that does not belong to him. It speaks volumes about the twisted depths of Zionist corruption and Jewish-supremacist racism.

Text, 26 July, 1:31 a.m., EEST: A few minutes after the previous text arrived, Adnan sent the following. It’s a heartbreaking summary of all that occurred and a eulogy for Deir Alla.

A new tragedy is added to the calamities and displacement of the Palestinian people. After appeals and cries for help from the people of Deir Alla community during the previous period, which fell on deaf ears and blind eyes, what was expected finally happened. Like all Bedouin communities, as families were displaced after continuous attacks by settlers—who destroyed, ruined, and tightened the noose on the people in the area—and through the occupation army— which quickly carried out arrests [of Palestinians] after the attacks and forced the people to pay heavy bail—and a policy of marginalization by the responsible authorities and institutions, they left their homes.

They left after a long period of harsh suffering, the last of which was last night, with homes being destroyed, and property being smashed and stolen. This forced them to leave for a dark destination with no less suffering ahead of them than what they have been through and still endure each day. They leaving behind memories swallowed in a land they never thought they would ever leave in this painful and hurtful way. We can only say, ‘God is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.’

Adnan’s late-night cry from the soul, a lament for the ruin of his beloved Bedouin community, came to its inevitable conclusion hours later: On Saturday afternoon when the last families left Deir Alla.

Text, 26 July, 11:02 p.m., EEST: “The last 3 families in the compound left this afternoon.”

Later that night, Jewish terrorists went on a rampage that made the pages of Haaretz: “Settlers Torch Palestinian Homes in West Bank, Residents Flee Village.” Four houses were set ablaze, including the home belonging to Adnan’s aged parents.

Text, 26 July, 11:23 p.m., EEST: “This is a picture of our house after the evacuation.”

Text 26 July, 11:46 p.m., EEST: “This is why the residents dismantled everything when they left. But before that, there was an opinion that they should close the doors to the homes so that they could return to them in the future. They were surprised in the morning by the destruction of the houses, theft, and burning the previous evening.”

Adnan’s text continued:

An hour ago, I was with my mother. I saw her tears running down her cheeks, and she was asking me about the smallest things. Are they [the homes] still the same? Is there hope that we will go back?

They [Zionists] are keen on destruction and devastation so that there is no hope of return, but the home is not what hurts our hearts, it is also the land that we have loved and still love since childhood.

■

This report should have ended here. But On Sunday, 27 July, more devastating revelations emerged when Adnan drove to Deir Alla earlier that day to check on the empty community and homes—including the home his mother had hoped to return to. This was his message:

Text, 27 July, 6:48 p.m. EEST: “Shocking tragedy happened. The settlers used heavy machinery to demolish the houses and raze them to the ground. When I returned to film, I was chased by them.”

The photos below need no explanation.

■

Coda.

I had set to work on this report and the arduous task of sorting texts, photos, and videos to create a coherent account when an anomalous photo arrived from Adnan: A helicopter. The Zionist Occupation Force was using the recently abandoned and destroyed community for military training purposes.

Text, 27 July, 11:46 p.m., EEST: “They train in and near destroyed houses and next to settlers. Before that, they trained by landing helicopters on houses. I have a video before my family’s homes were destroyed and the helicopters were training on them. Sometimes the pilots would train using helicopters over houses without shooting so that new pilots could be trained on how to lower the planes next to or over houses. This made our lives miserable because of the dust, dirt, and loud noises.”

The following photo shows a helicopter training in what is left of Deir Alla. The video below that, taken on an ordinary day before the community was destroyed, shows a helicopter training next to a house. Imagine. This is life in Occupied Palestine under the relentless oppression, humiliation, and violence of the Zionist entity.

■

This is where Adnan’s report ends.

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17 JULY—“I can see things are getting worse.” These are words sent yesterday via WhatsApp by my contact in Kisan, a village of some 700 people located 11 kilometers southeast of the city of Bethlehem. I see the truth of this in the texts I receive daily from friends and correspondents throughout the West Bank. The situation is grim and grows grimmer with each passing day as the genocidal “Jewish state” escalates its ethnic-cleansing project throughout the entirety of Occupied Palestine.

What I report below marks an intensification of what is by now an established pattern of land theft, harassment, and numerous acts of terrorism carried out by Zionist Jews—Israeli Occupation Forces and the settlers they protect.

All of this while the starvation siege and bombing of Gaza continues.

West Bank Alerts is dedicated to providing reportage as close to the ground as possible. This is our contribution to the Palestinian cause. We are among the very few publication able to bring reports of this kind to western readers: first-person accounts from West Bank Palestinians living in refugee camps and rural areas—the people directly impacted, those who take great risks documenting Zionist crimes. Our intent is to humanize the dehumanized while exposing readers to the ever-escalating crimes of the dehumanizers.

What follows are recent updates sent as texts by Adnan al–Abayat, a resident of Kisan who documents settler and I.O.F. violence in his community. Abayat monitors the surrounding agriculture and grazing land, which has belonged to the families of Kisan for centuries, driving to remote locations when an attack is under way. Over many years, Abayat has created a large digital archive of photographic and video evidence of crimes committed by settlers and soldiers alike. His first report for West Bank Alerts was published 16 April under the title “Poisoning the ‘Holy Land.’”

Most of the incidents reported below occurred in or near a small Bedouin community—a “gathering,” to use Adnan’s word—known as Deir Alla. This tiny rural community is composed of several herding families, each with a permanent home along with pens and sheds for their animals. Deir Alla is part of the larger Kisan community and is located on land historically belonging to Kisan. Mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents call Deir Alla home.

All of what follows was reported and dispatched by Abayat. With each entry I include the time it was sent from the West Bank, time-stamped EEST, Eastern European Summer Time. The interpolations are mine, provided for clarification.

■

Kisan and Deir Alla.

Deir Alla is located 3 kilometers from the Ma'ale Amos settlement. It is from here that Jewish settlers descend upon the remote community to terrorize people, kill animals, and advance their illegitimate hold over historic Palestinian land. Whenever an attack occurs, I.O.F. soldiers show up to participate, actively or sometimes passively but always to defend and protect the settlers. Palestinian resistance or self-defense is severely punished. Previous updates from Deir Alla were published 10 June under the title, “West Bank impunities.”

The map bellow locates Kisan, circled in red, relative to Bethlehem and Hebron. The second map identifies the location of the illegal Ma'ale Amos settlement and Deir Alla relative to Kisan.

■

Text, 3 July, 8:16 p.m. EEST: “Settlers’ provocations are increasing, with attacks on citizens’ property in the Deir Alla area, southeast of the village of Kisan. Jewish herders set their livestock loose on the homes of residents on a daily basis, amidst the escalation in their terrorist attacks on the area and its inhabitants.”

The following two photos, screenshots taken toward the end of the video above, show the same herder ducking and hiding behind a rock. This Jewish settler is using his herd to trespass on Palestinian land. He makes his presence known as he spies on the family he’s targeting.

His behavior is routine. It’s a typical method of Zionist intimidation and harassment throughout the West Bank. Imagine, for a moment, the mental and emotional toll it takes on Palestinian families and children. This is a form of psychological terrorism.

The screenshot below shows the targeted home. The Bedouin land is what the herder wants. This land and home are what he—and all Zionist Israelis—intend to steal, one way or another.

■

Text, 5 July, 11:15 p.m. EEST: “This evening, settler herders attacked the Deir Alla Bedouin community located southeast of Kisan with the support of the occupation forces, beating and shooting Palestinian residents. Three young men from the community were arrested, Aref Al-Abayat, Fadi Al-Abayat, and Yousef Al-Abayat. They were taken to an unknown location amid the fierce assault, which included attacks against the residents, their property, and livestock.”

The following video, taken after the attack, shows settlers leaving the scene of their crime. I.O.F. solders, who protected the settlers as they engaged in what amounts to a pogrom, stand around watching. Jewish herders can be seen leaving the area with a large flock of goats. These herds, frequently driven through a community at the beginning of a settler attack, are used as a pretext for Jews to call the I.O.F.

Having trespassed on Palestinian land with their animals, settlers call in the I.O.F., claiming to be under attack by Arabs. Again, this is standard operating procedure. The lies are part of the Zionist joke.

Palestinians aren’t allowed to defend themselves from attack. Anyone who attempt to do so is either arrested, beaten, or shot. All of the men arrested during this attack were relatives of Adnand’s, his brother among them. The men were beaten before and after arrest. They were subsequently held for five days. They were fed a starvation diet, which consisted of four pieces of bread each day with a smearing of yogurt. Ultimately they were forced to pay a fine of 1,000 shekels for their release.

No settlers were arrested for attacking the community.

The photograph below shows settlers leaving the scene of their crime.

It takes a lot of Occupation soldiers to protect a gang of Zionist thugs:

■

Text, 10 July, 11:44 a.m. EEST: “Last night, 16-year-old Awad Ibrahim Ahmed Ghazal Munsef sustained several serious injuries and fractures after falling off his bicycle when a settler attempted to run him over in a car. This happened on the main street adjacent to the village. He was transferred to a hospital in Hebron for treatment.”

A separate source in Hebron reports that the boy remains hospitalized in stable but critical condition, as of today’s date. He sustained a severe head injury.

■

Text, 13 July, 11:41 a.m. EEST: “A number of settlers set up a tent this morning on private Palestinian land. This tent is located on the western side of the village of Kisan.”

Pitching a tent, anywhere on a hilltop on Palestinian land—and it is always a hilltop—marks the beginning of an illegal outpost, which in time will become a recognized settlement. From the outpost, settlers spy on nearby villages and home, launch raids, and steal Palestinian animals and agricultural equipment. They terrorize Palestinian herders by chasing them in all-terrain vehicles, setting dogs on them, and, when that fails to drive Palestinians away, Jewish settlers shoot at them, or call in the I.O.F. to do it for them.

There is no meaningful difference between settlers and soldiers. Settlers are inducted into the I.O.F. and given uniforms and military weaponry. They frequently attack Palestinians while dressed in uniforms. Curiously, the Zionist army doesn’t give settlers military boots and so their shoes give them away.

Text, 13 July, 11:41 a.m. EEST: “In light of the fierce attack of 5 July against the residents of Deir Alla, settlers stormed the community again this afternoon. They attacked residents and property with the support of the occupation army. They stole agricultural equipment. Deir Alla residents face constant provocations.”

When I asked Adnan about the photo below, he explained:

“They are settlers who stole equipment from the sheep pen. This equipment is for feeding young sheep and a tool for making yogurt from milk.”

■

Text, 14 July, 11:03 p.m. EEST: “The house of Ahmed Nassar Mohammed Rashaida was burned by settlers at dawn today after they threw a Molotov cocktail and broke the house windows.”

This house is among those of the Deir Alla Bedouin grouping. It is the most remote of the houses, farthest away from the other homes, and so most vulnerable to attack. Children were present at the time.

■

All that is published on West Bank Alerts has taken on additional significance beyond its contribution of reportage: However modestly, it documents and archives a partial record of Israel’s criminality, impunity, continued violation of international law, and disregard of all norms of civilized society. And this: from the experiences of ordinary Palestinians, living in locations not generally known about or reported on. It’s a record for future historians and—one can hope—criminal trials.

Note to reader: An anonymous aid organizations in Hebron has promised to build a new and separate road for village use only, as a way to protect the children of Kisan from settler attacks. I know this organization well and have worked with it on past projects with success. If any reader is moved to make a donation to the Kisan road project, please send me an email: winterwheat7@gmail.com

Published simultaneously at Winter Wheat.

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10 JULY—During my trips to the West Bank last year—made possible thanks to the generous donations of many readers of The Floutist and Winter Wheat—I traveled through the governorates of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron and visited numerous refugee camps along the way. One of these was al–Arroub, located seven miles north of the city Hebron, where I had the pleasure of meeting Ahmad al–Titi, in his capacity as a camp tour guide. We have since become friends.

It is because of that friendship, and the several projects we have worked on together, including a report published in West Bank Alerts, that I bring to your attention a GoFundMe campaign Ahmad started last November.

My young West Bank friend has hopes to improve his life by continuing his education. He plans to move to Germany and earn a master’s degree in information technology. I am entirely confident he will make a success of this.

“Why Germany?” I asked, when Ahmad first told me of his ambitions.

“Because they have the best technical programs,” he replied.

Like many Palestinians I’ve met, Ahmad values education. He graduated in 2023 from Palestine Polytechnic University with a degree in computer systems engineering. But employment prospects are few in Occupied Palestine—by design—and poverty rates in the West Bank are high. This is especially true for people born and raised in refugee camps. A master’s degree will give Ahmad better employment opportunities when he returns to the West Bank.

Ahmad’s commitment to the Palestinian cause remains unwavering as he pursues his advanced education. Upon returning to the West Bank he plans to start an IT club in al–Arroub, offering technical training to young people. He currently offers technical advice and help to anyone in the camp in need of assistance—free of charge.

Ahmad has been accepted into a masters program at Clausthal University of Technology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany. In 2023, he began studying German and easily passed the Goethe B1 German language exam in partial fulfillment of the language requirements for graduate-level studies. Through his own efforts, Ahmad has raised half of what he needs to relocate to Germany and begin graduate school.

Ahmad is known in the camp—and beyond it—for his superb English and the informative tours he leads for visiting internationals. Anyone who has taken one of Ahmad’s tours comes away with a deeper understanding of Palestinian history and life in a refugee camp. An excellent article about Ahmad was published this past December in Roar, the official student newspaper of King’s College London.

In March of this year, I worked closely with Ahmad on the translation from Arabic into English of an important book that documents conditions inside one of Israel’s notorious prisons. Ahmad helped with the final translation and I edited the English. It was a genuine pleasure working with Ahmad. He has a remarkably disciplined work ethic and is always kind and good humored. I know he will thrive in graduate school.

With your support, Ahmad—born and raised in a refugee camp, intimately familiar with all of the violence that circumscribes Palestinian life—will be able to realize his dreams for a better future. Your generosity will benefit many others well into the future because of Ahmad’s commitment to his community and people.

Please contribute at whatever level you can to Ahmad’s GoFundMe campaign. His funding goal of €6,000 is a modest one and he is already half way there. All he needs is another €3,000 to meet his goal. Together, we can make it possible for Ahmad to start school in Germany in September.

You can also help by sharing this funding appeal.

Thank you!

7 JULY—I received a note the other day that I think it is imperative my readers see for the shocking realities it describes. The email message arrived from Mazin Qumsiyeh. Some of you may recognize Mazin’s name from the two-part series published earlier this year about the environmental destruction Zionism has inflicted on the land of Palestine: “Scars on the land,” and “An imagined reality.” Qumsiyeh is director of the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University. He is also an unflagging activist for his land and people. I hold him in high regard for all of his work.

I’ve been on Mazin’s extensive listserv for over a year. The email I publish below arrived from him on 2 July. It was written by a man named Omar, who wrote to Mazin from Gaza, where he is caring for a group of 22 people as they try to survive starvation and continuous bombing. Among all else it conveys, Omar’s email documents a heinous crime committed by Americans working at one of the food distribution sites.

I am also moved, as I am sure readers will be, by Omar’s description of his daily life, his hour-to-hour life, reduced to brutal bare existence, and for the way Omar confronts us—we Americans above all others—with our responsibility to act.

I share Omar’s letter with permission.

—C.M.

Omar.

Perhaps tonight is the last night I write to you. I hope it isn’t the last—or maybe it’s better if I don’t hope at all.

This soul is weary; it craves peace. The tanks are near. Their roar sits heavy in my lap, rattling this exhausted body. Gunfire crackles without end, everywhere. The grinding of treads devours what little memory remains—I hear it so clearly, crushing my dreams. My dreams! What a hollow word. I don’t even know how it slipped through my fingers. A burst of bullets—first, second, third… Dear God, what is this madness?!

My hand trembles again as Ahmed, my nephew, crouches like a hunted thing, clinging to his grandmother. Fear gnaws at him, crouching over his small body like a predator savoring its prey. Children are easy meat for terror. The tanks roll closer. The wail of ambulances swells. And I wonder: Will another image emerge? A man burning, his body torn open, while the world feasts on his agony—only to forget him in two days?

Has our suffering become a stepping stone for others’ success? I don’t know if morning will come. Not tomorrow’s dawn—but the dawn of the sky, when my soul rises to a place wrapped in peace, where love flocks like doves. A place untouched by this screaming violence.

The price of sugar in Gaza is extremely high, and the Americans involved in the American aid know this very well. What happened today is one of the worst crimes ever committed. Read carefully what I’m about to say:

As soon as the first wave of American aid arrives, people rush to get sugar first. Today, the Americans deliberately placed the sugar in a separate area. Then, they dug a deep pit just before the sugar zone, covered it with nylon, and lightly sprinkled it with dirt so that no one would see it or notice. The starving reached the sugar first, and seven people fell into the pit. Then a bulldozer came and buried them alive. Meanwhile, a man in his fifties was returning from the aid area, nearly collapsing. I held him, and he said to me: “I’d rather die of hunger than go back to that aid—it’s aid of death.”

Omar’s letter ends here.

All that Omar wrote in his email to Mazin stands as a condemnation of the United States—an indictment of the gravest magnitude. America and specific Americans—two presidents and their administrations among them—are complicit in the very worst crimes against humanity.

America alone is the country that could have prevented, and subsequently stopped, this genocide but that instead armed and funded it against the wishes of a majority of its own citizens. The two questions each of us need consider are these: What am I doing to stop it? And is it enough?

Published simultaneously in Winter Wheat, and The Floutist.

25 JUNE—Two weeks ago, on Tuesday, 10 June, videos arrived from the West Bank in quick succession, announced by an alarming series of pings. They were sent by Qadir al–Thaer, my friend and correspondent in al–Arroub refugee camp. A volley of rockets from Yemen was flying overhead, on trajectory for the ’48 land, as the Zionist state of Israel is referred to by most Palestinians. Most were intercepted by the once vaunted and now sputtering Iron Dome.

Look at these images (see below). They seem almost quaint when compared with the magnitude and number of Iranian missiles that would soon light up the sky.

Three days later, 13 June, the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv launched its unprovoked war of aggression against Iran. Eight days after that, the U.S. bombed Iran. It has been a head-spinning two weeks, one war crime exceeding the next. And all of it more spectacularly dramatic and consequential—at least for those staging and reporting on our late imperial circus of the deranged—than the last 20 months of genocide in Gaza, which is all but unreported in the Western press.

Palestinians in the West Bank have not forgotten Gaza. For this reason they don’t say much about their own situation and suffering. But suffer they do. A recent text from a friend in Hebron expressed shock and sorrow about the children dying in Gaza, starving to death. He made no mention of his family’s many hardships.

With rockets and missiles overhead—frequently falling out of the sky on top of them—what impact has “the Jewish state’s” latest unhinged aggression had on West Bank Palestinians?

What follows is not in any sense breaking news. Rather, it’s a snapshot—a mere glimpse, nothing close to a complete picture—of life these past two weeks in the West Bank. Except as noted, all of what follows was sent and reported by al–Thaer. With each entry I include the time it was sent from the West Bank, time-stamped EEST, Eastern European Summer Time. The interpolations are mine, provided for clarification.

■

Yemen fulfills its obligations

Text, 10 June, 8:16 p.m., EEST: The following video, taken in al–Arroub, shows rockets arriving from Yemen. Maghreb, the sunset call to prayer, can be heard along with the wail of a siren, warning nearby settlers of the impending attack and to take cover in bomb shelters. Meanwhile, Palestinians go about their lives.

Above the camp, Iron Dome interceptor missiles attempt to destroy the incoming projectiles. Near the end of the video a bright flash can be seen on the horizon where rockets were successfully intercepted. Debris from these aerial skirmishes routinely falls upon the people below. Still, Palestinians celebrate Ansar Allah’s attacks. Yemen, fulfilling its legal obligation to intervene in a genocide, has not forgotten Gaza.

■

Iran Retaliates

Text, 13 June, 9:49 p.m., EEST: The video below documents Iran’s first retaliatory strike against Israel. Interceptor missiles from the Iron Dome light up the sky.

Text, 13 June, 10:14 p.m., EEST: This video, filmed in Tel Aviv, records a series of Zionist surface-to-air missiles and a successful Iranian strike. It is now illegal to film Iran’s strikes and people who post them are hunted down and arrested.

Text, 13 June, 11:24 p.m., EEST: The following video documents a raid in the camp—an hour earlier missiles were flying overhead. Even as Iran sends missiles into Israel, the I.O.F. continues its mission of terror against indigenous Palestinians. Raids are more frequent and violent as Zionists accelerate their project of ethnic cleansing and vent frustration and anger on civilians. Little of this is ever reported in Western countries.

■

Text, 14 June, 11:08 a.m., ESST: This photo is a screenshot of an official alert. Not to be missed: All of historic Palestine is included as part of the Zionist “Home Front,” even as this warning is not meant to protect all of the people living on this land.

Text, 14 June, 2:15 - 2:45 a.m., ESST: A series of audio files arrived while a raid was in progress at al–Arroub. I’ve transcribed them as follows:

They’re in the neighborhood. It’s so difficult to communicate . . . and know where they exactly are. I’m scared . . . I’ve never been . . . They’ve never been this close. And I’m scared because they are now following a new approach. They’re raiding, storming random houses to search the phones and see if anyone filmed the rockets of Iran or if there’s anything on their phones that supports Iran.

They’re outside. They threw a stun grenade at my grandparent’s roof . . . right next to us.

I really hope this nightmare will end soon. Because wallah, here we are tired. I’m tired. Mentally I can’t take this any more. I’m . . . don’t think I’m built for this. Maybe I’m built for some minor small raids in the camp, stun grenades, tear gas, some shooting in the sky. But I’m not built for something big like this. Regional war. Rockets crossing the sky. Drones. Storming houses. Searching phones. Beating people up if they have anything about the rockets in their phones. Checkpoints. Roads blocked. Cities are blocked. It’s been like this for a year and a half now. It’s so draining. I feel like in this year I [aged] five years.

The Arabic word wallah means “I swear to Allah.” It’s a way of emphasizing the truth of what is being said.

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Text, 15 June, 2:54 a.m., ESST: In the following, the camp is completely dark, all house and street lights are off. People whistle and clap, signaling approval of Iran’s strike. On the horizon bright flashes indicate numerous Iranian missiles were intercepted.

Text, 15 June, 2:59 a.m., ESST: The following audio files document a joint attack by Yemen and Iran and the reaction of Palestinians on the ground.

Text, 15 June, 3:03 a.m., ESST: This video shows a direct hit on Tel Aviv during the same barrage described above.

Here, al–Thaer comments on the strike.

Text, 15 June, 8:49 a.m., ESST: “Right above us. Crazy wave,” Thaer texted when he sent the following. He is yelling in Arabic at his siblings to go inside because Iranian rockets were then being intercepted over the camp.

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Text, 16 June, 4:11 a.m., ESST: Screenshot of an alert identifying areas under attack.

Text, 16 June, 4:23 a.m., ESST: As Fajr, the dawn prayer, sounds in the background incoming rockets are intercepted overhead. You might wonder when these people have the opportunity to sleep. In fact, too often they don’t sleep, which has profoundly negative health impacts.

Text, 16 June, 4:32 a.m., ESST: A few minutes after the missiles pass over al–Arroub, they strike Tel Aviv.

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Text, 18 June, 12:55 a.m., ESST: The following videos show incoming Iranian rockets, one of which was intercepted over the camp, as seen in the second video.

Text, 18 June, 2:14 a.m., ESST: The following audio file was sent during a raid. It documents the first time drones are deployed in the camp. These appear to have been used solely for surveillance. How long, I can’t help but wonder, until weaponized quadcopters are deployed.

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On Thursday, 19 June, I reached out to a friend in the town of Dura. This is a young woman, age 24, who graduated three weeks ago with a degree in pharmacy.

“How has life changed,” I wanted to know, “since the Zionist entity attacked Iran?”

Her reply came as a series of texts:

It’s a little bit chaotic. Gas ran out at a lot of gas stations. People started to panic. Now you have to take a number, like a coupon, if you want to fuel your car. Also, cigarettes have become more expensive—I don’t know what’s the connection!

They closed some checkpoints, as always. Honestly, them being more aggressive on the streets and checkpoints and closing checkpoints for hours and days is their first response to anything.

There was a video of a bride and groom who were trying to cross the checkpoint on their wedding day. They [I.O.F.] didn’t allow them. So the couple left the car behind the checkpoint and walked to the other side.

The road closures are our daily struggle.

In the 48 land it’s harder I think. They are not allowed even to take photos of the missiles. Can you imagine?

Some of the missiles fall here in the West Bank. But people are happy about them. They keep taking photos with the missiles. And when the Iranian missiles appear in the sky people start to calibrate, whistle and clap. It’s such a vibe, wallah.

I have so far received no report of extended food shortages beyond the first two days of the war when shelves were stripped bare. For now, food trucks are allowed to make their deliveries in the early morning. So I’ve been told. With a fragile ceasefire in place it will be interesting see how and if things improve for West Bank Palestinians. Zionist Israel has a long history of using war and conflict to further its goals of land theft and ethnic cleansing. There is every reason to believe the fascist regime in Tel Aviv will use this most recent aggression to accelerate its plans in the West Bank.

22 June—Cultures throughout West Asia have a tradition whereby a man may ascend to a revered position within his community due to his spirit of benevolence. Such a man assumes no political position or elected office. These are ordinary men—ordinary but extraordinary who, by virtue of long years of community service, generosity, kindness toward others, and a sense of justice, are beloved and respected by all. The Arabic word for this person, الأب الروحي, translates roughly as godfather. In Iran such a person is known as a javānmard.

Two days ago, 20 June, I asked a friend in al–Arroub refugee camp to see of he could get a statement from a community leader, in the form of a direct appeal to Americans. President Trump was then contemplating the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. My friend visited the nearby refugee camp of New Askar and spoke with a respected community leader—just such a man as described above. I cannot say anything more about this person. Nor can I provide a photograph or name. To do so would put him at significant risk.

What follows is this man’s statement. It arrived yesterday via WhatsApp, time stamped 11:25 a.m. Pacific time. American B–2s dropped their first bombs four hours and twenty-one minutes later.

I publish this now as a call to Americans—spoken from the heart of one Palestinian man who, in all that he imparts, is representative of many West Bank people I have spoken with. His is a call to remember and take responsibility for our humanity, to connect with our best aspirations, and to answer for the government that acts and commits monstrous crimes in our names.

—C.M.

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We cherish life just as you cherish freedom.

To every heart and mind of an American citizen struggling through daily hardships to achieve a decent standard of living,
To every American father and mother whose son or daughter serves Trump’s economic interests,
To every American citizen who has the right to vote,
To every living religious conscience,

I appeal to you: Stop supporting the apartheid state, the state of genocide, the Israeli occupation state.
With your tax money, they occupy our land and destroy Christ’s dream of love and life.
They defy the teachings of Moses: Do not kill, respect human rights.

We can live together in the Holy Land without occupation,
We can pray in Jerusalem without apartheid walls.
With your help, we can build a more beautiful homeland where justice and peace prevail.

Call for love and peace in the land of peace.
Be our voice. Stand for freedom. Stop the war and the massacres.
Let your prayers be for ending the war,
For freedom,
So that our peoples may live with hope, believing that you stand with justice.

We live in refugee camps within our own homeland.
And we declare clearly:
No to war,
No to bombing,
No to Trump’s support for Israel.

Your money is better spent:
On strengthening your economy,
On healthcare programs,
On supporting the homeless—
Not on funding killing and occupation.

Published simultaneously at The Floutist and Winter Wheat.